LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 

Chap, ._, Copyright No. 

She!f„>_^ Pf- 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



LITTLE MASTERPIECES 



Little Masterpieces 

Edited by Bliss Perry 



CHARLES LAMB 



SELECTIONS FROM HIS 



ESSAYS, LETTERS AND VERSES 



NEW YORK 
DOUBLEDAY & McCLURE CO. 



1899 







41433 

COPYRIGHTED 1 899 
BY 

DOUBLEDAY & McCLURE CO. 



Acknowledgment is due to A. C. Armstrong 

& Son for permission to use selections 

from the text of their edition of 

Lamb's letters, edited by 

Alfred Ainger. 



/ 



S"feV\2> 



Editor's Introduction 



The only editorial discomfort in selecting a 
couple of hundred of Lamb's choicest pages has 
arisen from a sense of the excellence of those 
other pages that have not been taken. Even 
were the choice to be made from the "Essays of 
Elia" alone, the chooser must needs stand like 
a boy under an apple-tree, with pockets stuffed 
already, and yet eyeing and comparing and half 
tempted to trade his plunderings for some of 
the fruit still hanging on the tree, — so hazard- 
ous is this business of making sure that one 
has the best. To justify in set terms one's in- 
stinctive preference among the delicate-fla- 
voured fruitage of Lamb's genius is a still more 
difficult task, and perhaps not altogether worth 
doing, even were it possible. 

In casting about for some word or other o£ 
preface, however, it occurred to the editor to> 
consult the latest literary handbook and dis- 
cover how Lamb was faring nowadays at the 
hands of the professional critics. He found 
first some five pages ^f Biography, — all about 
the Temple and Christ's Hospital, the South 
Sea House, the India House, the home life* 



Editor's Introduction 

tragic and gay, the publication of essays and 
verses, the long holiday at last and the quiet 
ending; then three closely-printed pages of 
Bibliography on Lamb's style; and finally, the 
following ten Particular Characteristics, each 
vouched for by various competent critics and 
proved by illustrative examples : I. Quaint- 
ness — Fondness for the Antique. 2. Tenderness 
— Sympathy with Humanity. 3. Graceful Ease 
— Companionability. 4. Amiable Humour. 5. 
Wit — Epigram — Paronomasia. (This last, O 
unclassical reader, means that Lamb liked to 
make puns ; — and they were the worst, that is 
to say, the best, in the world!) 6. Self-Reflec- 
tion — Unselfish Egoism. 7. Delicate Fancy. 8. 
Melancholy. 9. Critical Acumen. 10. Discur- 
siveness. 

To all who love Particular Characteristics the 
foregoing list is warmly commended. It has 
been borrowed without leave and is reproduced 
here with a kind of awe. For in the two edi- 
tions of Lamb which the editor knows best 
there are marginal comments in great plenty, 
and yet nothing whatever is said about Particu- 
lar Characteristics. One edition is a tattered 
paper-bound affair, with boyish pencil marks 
drawn long and black along the margin of 
many a delicious paragraph. The other, still 
more highly prized, is annotated throughout 
in the minute beautiful handwriting of that 
lover of Lamb's memory and fit companion for 
Lamb himself, the late Professor Dodd of 
vi 



Editor's Introduction 

Williams College. But even in those luminous 
and scholarly footnotes there is nothing about 
Graceful Ease or Amiable Humour or Critical 
Acumen. Professor Dodd was somewhat old- 
fashioned in his tastes, and never had the ad- 
vantage of Laboratory Courses in literature. 

To confess the truth, this little volume is 
equally innocent of any disciplinary intention. 
It is not designed to train the critical faculties 
of anybody. It is meant to be slipped into the 
pocket and pulled out when one feels like read- 
ing Lamb. The nine "Essays of Elia" which it 
contains are among the most delightful of that 
rare company and are fairly representative of 
the range of Lamb's moods and tastes. Some of 
them, like "Dream-Children" and "The Super- 
annuated Man," are frankly autobiographical, 
and all of them, it is needless to say, have a 
good deal of Lamb in them. To one reading 
him for the first time they will prove, it is 
hoped, a happy introduction, and they contain 
many of those passages which old friends of 
one of the friendliest of writers find themselves 
reading over and over with a perpetually re- 
newed and deepened pleasure. 

A distinctive feature of the book is the in- 
clusion of a dozen or more of Lamb's letters, 
which have not hitherto been put within easy 
reach of the general public. These letters not 
only, as Mr. Birrell has remarked, "do the 
reader good by stealth," but explain many facts 
and motives of Lamb's life that would other- 



Editor's Introduction 

wise be misinterpreted. It has been thought 
best to print here even those two most per- 
sonal letters to Coleridge concerning the great 
tragedy of the Lamb household, because with- 
out a knowledge of Lamb's domestic circum- 
stances the sweetness and heroism of his nature 
cannot be fully perceived. The letters to his 
friends Manning, Wordsworth, Bernard Barton 
and others, reflect the surroundings of Lamb's 
later life and make more complete the expres- 
sion of a lovable personality. 

Lamb's poetry is now little read, but some 
of it is so graceful and felicitous that a volume 
of selections from his writings should certainly 
include a few specimens of his verse. I have 
chosen the "Farewell to Tobacco" (it was not a 
very long farewell, by the way!) the daintily 
lyrical lines entitled "She is Going," and "The 
Old Familiar Faces," whose simple, haunting 
pathos has given it a secure immortality among 
English minor poetry. 

BLISS PERRY. 



Viil 





CONTENTS 






• 


PAGE 


Editor's 


5 Introduction 


. . v 


Essays- 






The Two Races of Men 


3 


New Year's Eve 


ii 


Imperfect Sympathies 


21 


Dream-Children : A Reveri< 


2 • • 34 


A ] 


Dissertation Upon Roas 


t Pig . 40 


On 


Some of the Old Actor; 


5 • • 52 


Detached Thoughts on Books and 


Reading 


70 


The 


Superannuated Mar 


i . . 8o 


Old China 


91 


Letters 






To 


Coleridge 


. 103 


To 


Coleridge 




. ios 


To 


Manning 




112 


To 


Wordsworth . 




. 114 


To 


Manning 




. 117 


To 


Miss Hutchinson 




122 


To 


J. Taylor 




. 123 


To 


J. Taylor 




. 125 


To 


Bernard Barton 




127 


To 


Wordsworth . 




129 


To 


Bernard Barton 




. 133 


To 


Wordsworth . 




. 136 


To 


Wordsworth . 




. 143 


Verses- 






A Farewell to Tobacco 


. 149 


She 


Is Going 


. 154 


The Old Familiar Face 


3 


. • 155 



Essays 



ESSAYS 



THE TWO RACES OF MEN 

The human species, according to the best 
theory I can form of it, is composed of two 
distinct races, the men who borrow, and the 
men who lend. To these two original diversi- 
ties may be reduced all those impertinent 
classifications of Gothic and Celtic tribes, white 
men, black men, red men. All the dwellers 
upon earth, "Parthians, and Medes, and Elam- 
ites," flock hither, and do naturally fall in with 
one or other of these primary distinctions. The 
infinite superiority of the former, which I 
choose to designate as the great race, is dis- 
cernible in their figure, port, and a certain in- 
stinctive sovereignty. The latter are born de- 
graded. "He shall serve his brethren." There 
is something in the air of one of this cast, lean 
and suspicious ; contrasting with the open, 
trusting, generous manners of the other. 

Observe who have been the greatest borrow- 
ers of all ages — Alcibiades — Falstaff — Sir Ricb- 

3 



Charles Lamb 

ard Steele — our late incomparable Brinsley,— 
what a family likeness in all four ! 

What a careless, even deportment hath your 
borrower ! what rosy gills ! what a beautiful re- 
liance on Providence doth he manifest, — taking 
no more thought than lilies ! What contempt 
for money, — accounting it (yours and mine es- 
pecially) no better than dross ! What a liberal 
confounding of those pedantic distinctions of 
mcum and tuum! or rather, what a noble sim- 
plification of language, (beyond Tooke,) re- 
solving these supposed opposites into one clear, 
intelligible pronoun adjective ! What near ap- 
proaches doth he make to the primitive com- 
munity, — to the extent of one-half of the prin- 
ciple at least. 

He is the true taxer who "calleth all the 
world up to be taxed ;" and the distance is as 
vast between him and one of us, as subsisted 
between the Augustan Majesty and the poorest 
obolary Jew that paid his tribute-pittance at 
Jerusalem! — His exactions, too, have such a 
cheerful, voluntary air ! — so far removed from 
your sour parochial or state-gatherers, — those 
ink-horn varlets, who carry their want of wel- 
come in their faces ! He cometh to you with a 
smile, and troubleth you with no receipt; con- 
fining himself to no set season. Every day is 
his Candlemas, or his Feast of Holy Michael. 
He applieth the lene tormentum of a pleasant 
look to your purse, — which to that gentle 
warmth expands her silken leaves, as naturally 

4 



Essays 



as the cloak of the traveller, for which sun and 
wind contended. He is the true Propontic 
which never ebbeth, — the sea which taketh 
handsomely at each man's hand. In vain the 
victim, whom he delighteth to honour, strug- 
gles with destiny ; he is in the net. Lend there- 
fore cheerfully, O man ordained to lend, that 
thou lose not in the end, with thy worldly 
penny, the reversion promised. Combine not 
preposterously in thine own person the penal- 
ties of Lazarus and of Dives; — but when thou 
seest the proper authority coming, meet it 
smilingly, as it were half-way. Come, a hand- 
some sacrifice ! See how light he makes of it ! 
Strain not courtesies with a noble enemy. 

Reflections like the foregoing were forced 
upon my mind by the death of my old friend, 
Ralph Bigod, Esq., who parted this life on 
Wednesday evening; dying, as he had lived, 
without much trouble. He boasted himself a 
descendant from mighty ancestors of that 
name, who heretofore held ducal dignities in 
this realm. In his actions and sentiments he 
belied not the stock to which he pretended. 
Early in life he found himself invested with 
ample revenues; which, with that noble disin- 
terestedness which I have noticed as inherent 
in men of the great race, he took almost imme- 
diate measures entirely to dissipate and bring 
to nothing: for there is^ something revolting in 
the idea of a king holding a private purse ; and 
the thoughts of Bigod were all regal. Thus 



Charles Lamb 

furnished by the very act of disfurnishment,— 
getting rid of the cumbersome luggage of 
riches, more apt (as one sings) 

To slacken virtue, and abate her edge, 

Than prompt her to do aught may merit praise. 

he set forth, like some Alexander, upon his 
great enterprise, "borrowing and to borrow !" 

In his periegesis, or triumphant progress 
throughout this island, it has been calculated 
that he laid a tythe part of the inhabitants un- 
der contribution. I reject this estimate as 
greatly exaggerated; but having had the hon- 
our of accompanying my friend divers times in 
his perambulations about this vast city, I own 
I was greatly struck at first with the prodigious 
number of faces we met who claimed a sort of 
respectful acquaintance with us. He was one 
day so obliging as to explain the phenomenon. 
It seems these were his tributaries ; feeders of 
his exchequer; gentlemen, his good friends, (as 
he was pleased to express himself,) to whom 
he had occasionally been beholden for a loan. 
Their multitudes did no way disconcert him. 
He rather took a pride in numbering them; 
and, with Comus, seemed pleased to be 
"stocked with so fair a herd." 

With such sources, it was a wonder he con- 
trived to keep his treasury always empty. He 
did it by force of an aphorism, which he had 
often in his mouth, that "money kept longer 
than three days stinks." So he made use of it 
6 



Essays 

while it was fresh. A good part he drank 
away (for he was an excellent tosspot) ; some 
he gave away, the rest he threw away, literally 
tossing and hurling it violently from him — as 
boys do burrs, or as if it had been infectious — 
into ponds, or ditches, or deep holes, inscruta- 
ble cavities of the earth; — or he would bury 
it (where he would never seek it again) by a 
river's side under some bank, which (he would 
facetiously observe) paid no interest; but out 
away from him it must go peremptorily, as 
Hagar's offspring into the wilderness, while it 
was sweet. He never missed it. The streams 
were perennial which fed his fisc. When new 
supplies became necessary, the first person that 
had the felicity to fall in with him, friend or 
stranger, was sure to contribute to the de- 
ficiency ; for Bigod had an undeniable way with 
him. He had a cheerful, open exterior, a quick 
jovial eye, a bald forehead, just touched with 
grey (cana fides). He anticipated no excuse, 
and found none. And, waiving for a while my 
theory as to the great race, I would put it to 
the most untheorising reader, who may at times 
have disposable coin in his pocket, whether it is 
not more repugnant to the kindliness of his 
nature to refuse such a one as I am describing, 
than to say no to a poor petitionary rogue 
(your bastard borrower) who, by his mumping 
visnomy, tells you that he expects nothing bet- 
ter; and, therefore, whose preconceived notions 



Charles Lamb 

and expectations you do in reality so much less 
shock in the refusal. 

When I think of this man, — his fiery glow of 
heart, his swell of feeling, — how magnificent, 
how ideal he was; how great at the midnight 
hour; and when I compare with him the com- 
panions with whom I have associated since, I 
grudge the saving of a few idle ducats, and 
think that I am fallen into the society of lend' 
ers and little men. 

To one like Elia whose treasures are rather 
cased in leather covers than closed in iron cof- 
fers, there is a class of alienators more formi- 
dable than that which I have touched upon ; I 
mean your borrowers of books — those muti- 
lators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry 
of shelves, and creators of odd volumes. There 
is Comberbatch, matchless in his depredations ! 

That foul gap in the bottom shelf facing you, 
like a great eye-tooth knocked out — (you are 
now with me in my little back study in Blooms- 
bury, reader) — with the huge Switzer-like 
tomes on each side (like the Guildhall giants, 
in their reformed posture, guardant of noth- 
ing) once held the tallest of my folios, Opera 
Bonaventnrce, choice and massive divinity, to 
which its two supporters (school divinity also, 
but of a lesser calibre, — Bellarmine, and Holy 
Thomas) showed but as dwarfs, — itself an 
Ascapart! — that Comberbatch abstracted upon 
the faith of a theory he holds, which is more 
easy, I confess, for me to suffer by than to re- 



Essays 

fute, namely, that "the title to property in a 
book, (my Bonaventure, for instance,) is in 
exact ratio to the claimant's powers of under- 
standing and appreciating the same." Should 
he go on acting upon this theory, which of our 
shelves is safe? 

The slight vacuum in the left-hand case — ■ 
two shelves from the ceiling — scarcely distin- 
guishable but by the quick eye of a loser — was 
whilom the commodious resting-place of 
Brown on Urn Burial. C. will hardly allege 
that he knows more about that treatise than I 
do, who introduced it to him, and was indeed 
the first (of the moderns) to discover its beau- 
ties ; but so have I known a foolish lover to 
praise his mistress in the presence of a rival 
more qualified to carry her off than himself. 
Just below, Dodsley's dramas want their fourth 
volume, where Vittoria Corombona is ! The 
remainder nine are as distasteful as Priam's 
refuse sons when the Fates borrowed Hector. 
Here stood the Anatomy of Melancholy, in 
sober state. There loitered the Complete Ang- 
ler ; quiet as in life, by some stream side. In 
yonder nook, John Buncle, a widower-volume, 
with "eyes closed," mourns his ravished mate. 

One justice I must do my friend, that if he 
sometimes, like the sea, sweeps away a treas- 
ure, at another time, sea-like, he throws up as 
rich an equivalent to match it. I have a small 
under-collection of this nature, (my friend's 
gatherings in his various calls,) picked up, he 

9 



Charles Lamb 

has forgotten at what odd places, and deposited 
with as little memory at mine. I take in these 
orphans, the twice-deserted. These proselytes 
of the gate are welcome as the true Hebrews. 
There they stand in conjunction; natives and 
naturalized. The latter seem as little disposed 
to inquire out their true lineage as I am. — I 
charge no warehouse-room for these deodands, 
nor shall ever put myself to the ungentlemanly 
trouble of advertising a sale of them to pay 
expenses. 

To lose a volume to C. carries some sense 
and meaning in it. You are sure that he will 
make one hearty meal on your viands, if he can 
give no account of the platter after it. But 
what moved thee, wayward, spiteful K — , to be 
so importunate to carry off with thee, in spite 
of tears and adjurations to thee to forbear, the 
Letters of that princely woman, the thrice noble 
Margaret Newcastle? — knowing at the time, 
and knowing that I knew also, thou most as- 
suredly wouldst never turn over one leaf of the 
illustrious folio : — what but the mere spirit of 
contradiction, and childish love of getting the 
better of thy friend? — Then (worst cut of all !) 
to transport it with thee to the Gallican land — 

Unworthy land to harbour such a sweetness, 
A virtue in which all ennobling thoughts dwelt, 
Pure thoughts, kind thoughts, high thoughts, 
her sex's wonder ! 

hadst thou not thy play-books, and books of 

jests and fancies, about thee, to keep thee 

10 



Essays 



merry, even as thou keepest all companies with 
thy quips and mirthful tales? Child of the 
Green-room, it was unkindly done of thee. 
Thy wife, too, that part-French, better-part 
English woman! — that she could fix upon no 
other treatise to bear away, in kindly token of 
remembering us, than the works of Fulke 
Greville, Lord Brook, — of which no French- 
man, nor woman of France, Italy, or England, 
was ever by nature constituted to comprehend 
a title ! — Was there not Zimmerman on Soli- 
tude ? 

Reader, if haply thou art blest with a moder- 
ate collection, be shy of showing it; or if thy 
heart overfloweth to lend them, lend thy books ; 
but let it be to such a one as S. T. C. : he will 
return them (generally anticipating the time 
appointed) with usury, enriched with annota- 
tions tripling their value. I have had experi- 
ence. Many are these precious MSS. of his — 
(in matter oftentimes, and almost in quantity 
not unfrequently, vying with the originals) in 
no very clerklv hand — legible in my Daniel ; in 
old Burton; in Sir Thomas Browne; and those 
abstruser cogitations of the Greville, — now, 
alas, wandering in Pagan lands! I counsel 
thee, shut not thy heart nor thy library against 
S. T. C. 

NEW YEAR'S EVE 

Every man hath two birthdays : two days, at 
least, in every year, which set him upon revolv- 
ii 



Charles Lamb 

ing the lapse of time, as it affects his mortal 
duration. The one is that which in an espe- 
cial manner he termeth his. In the gradual 
desuetude of old observances, this custom of 
solemnizing our proper birthday hath nearly 
passed away, or is left to children, who reflect 
nothing at all about the matter, nor understand 
anything in it beyond cake and orange. But 
the birth of a New Year is of an interest too 
wide to be pretermitted by king or cobbler. No 
one ever regarded the first of January with in- 
difference. It is that from which all date their 
time, and count upon what is left. It is the 
nativity of our common Adam. 

Of all sound of all bells— (bells, the music 
nighest bordering upon heaven)— most solemn 
and touching is the peal which rings out the 
Old Year. I never hear it without a gathering- 
up of my mind to a concentration of all the 
images that have been diffused over the past 
twelvemonth; all I have done or suffered, per- 
formed or neglected, in that regretted time. I 
begin to know its worth, as when a person dies. 
It takes a personal colour ; nor was it a poetical 
flight in a contemporary when he exclaimed — 

I saw the skirts of the departing Year. 

It is no more than what in sober sadness 
everv one of us seems to be conscious of, in 
that awful leave taking. I am sure I felt it, 
and all felt it with me, last night ; though some 
of my companions affected rather to manifest 



Essays 



an exhilaration at the birth of the coming year, 
than any very tender regrets for the decease of 
its predecessor. But I am none of those who — 

Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest. 

I am naturally, beforehand, shy of novelties, 
— new books, new faces, new years, — from 
some mental twist which makes it difficult in 
me to face the prospective. I have almost 
ceased to hope; and am sanguine only in the 
prospects of other (former) years. I plunge 
into foregone visions and conclusions. I en- 
counter pell-mell with past disappointments. I 
am armour-proof against old discouragements. 
I forgive, or overcome in fancy, old adver- 
saries. I play over again for love, as the 
gamesters phrase it, games for which I once 
paid so dear. I would scarce now have any of 
those untoward accidents and events of my life 
reversed. I would no more alter them than 
the incidents of some well-contrived novel. 
Methinks it is better that I should have pined 
away seven of my goldenest years, when I was 
thrall to the fair hair and fairer eyes of Alice 
W — n, than that so passionate a love-adven- 
ture should be lost. It was better that our 
family should have missed that legacy, which 
old Dorrell cheated us of, than that I should 
have at this moment two thousand pounds in 
banco, and be without the idea of that specious 
old rogue. 

13 



Charles Lamb 

In a degree beneath manhood, it is my in- 
firmity to look back upon those early days. Do 
I advance a paradox, when I say, that, skip- 
ping over the intervention of forty years, a 
man may have leave to love himself, without 
the imputation of self-love? 

If I know aught of myself, no one whose 
mind is introspective — and mine is painfully so 
— can have a less respect for his present iden- 
tity than I have for the man Elia. I know him 
to be light, and vain, and humoursome; a no- 
torious* * * ; addicted to* * * * : averse from 
counsel, neither taking it nor offering it ; — * * * 
besides ; a stammering buffoon ; what you will ; 
lay it on, and spare not : I subscribe to it all, 
and much more than thou canst be willing to 
lay at his door : but for the child Elia, that 
"other me," there, in the back-ground, I must 
take leave to cherish the remembrance of that 
young master, — with as little reference, I pro- 
test, to this stupid changeling of five-and-forty 
as if it had been a child of some other house, 
and not of my parents. I can cry over its 
patient small-pox at five, and rougher medica- 
ments. I can lay its poor fevered head upon 
the sick pillow at Christ's, and wake with it in 
surprise at the gentle posture of maternal ten- 
derness hanging over it, that unknown had 
watched its sleep. I know how it shrank from 
any the least colour of falsehood. God help 
thee, Elia, how art thou changed ! — Thou art 
sophisticated. — I know how honest, how cour- 

14 



Essays 



ageous (for a weakling) it was, — how re- 
ligious, how imaginative, how hopeful ! From 
what have I not fallen, if the child I remember 
was indeed myself, and not some dissembling 
guardian, presenting a false identity, to give 
the rule to my unpractised steps, and regulate 
the tone of my moral being ! 

That I am fond of indulging beyond a hope 
of sympathy, in such retrospection, may be the 
symptom of some sickly idiosyncrasy. Or is it 
owing to another cause : simply, that being 
without wife or family, I have not learned to 
project myself enough out of myself; and hav- 
ing no offspring of my own to dally with, I 
turn back upon memory, and adopt my own 
early idea as my heir and favourite? If these 
speculations seem fantastical to thee, reader, (a 
busy man perchance,) if I tread out of the way 
of thy sympathy, and am singularly conceited 
only, I retire, impenetrable to ridicule, under 
the phantom cloud of Elia. 

The elders, with whom I was brought up, 
were of a character not likely to let slip the 
sacred observance of any old institution ; and 
the ringing out of the Old Year was kept by 
them with circumstances of peculiar ceremony. 
In those days the sound of those midnight 
chimes, though it seemed to raise hilarity in all 
around me, never failed to bring a train of 
pensive imagery into my fancy. Yet I then 
scarce conceived what it meant, or thought of 
it as a reckoning that concerned me. Not child* 
15 



Charles Lamb 

hood alone, but the young man till thirty, never 
feels practically that he is mortal. He knows it 
indeed, and, if need were he could preach a 
homily on the fragility of life ; but he brings it 
not home to himself, any more than in a hot 
June we can appropriate to our imagination the 
freezing days of December. But now (shall I 
confess a truth?) I feel these audits but too 
powerfully. I begin to count the probabilities 
of my duration, and to grudge at the expendi- 
ture of moments and shortest periods, like 
misers' farthings. In proportion as the years 
both lessen and shorten, I set more count upon 
their periods, and would fain lay my ineffectual 
finger upon the spoke of the great wheel. I am 
not content to pass away "like a weaver's shut- 
tle." Those metaphors solace me not, nor 
sweeten the unpalatable draught of mortality. 
I care not to be carried with the tide that 
smoothly bears human life to eternity; and 
reluct at the inevitable course of destiny. I am 
in love with this green earth, — the face of town 
and country, — the unspeakable rural solitudes, 
and the sweet security of streets. I would set 
up my tabernacle here I am content to stand 
still at the age to which I am arrived, — I and 
my friends, — to be no younger, no richer, no 
handsomer. I do not want to be weaned by 
age; or drop, like mellow fruit, as they say, 
into the grave. Any alteration, on this earth of 
mine, in diet or in lodging, puzzles and discom- 
poses me. My household gods plant a terrible 
16 



Essays 



fixed foot, and are not rooted up without blood. 
They do not willingly seek Lavinian shores. 
A new state of being staggers me. 

Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, 
and Summer holidays, and the greenness of 
fields, and the delicious juices of meats and 
fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and 
candle-light, and fireside conversations, and in- 
nocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself, — 
do these things go out with life? 

Can a ghost laugh, or shake his gaunt sides, 
when you are pleasant with him? 

And you, my midnight darlings, my Folios ! 
must I part with the intense delight of having 
you (huge armfuls) in my embrace*? Must 
knowledge come to me, if it come at all, by 
some awkward experiment of intuition, and no 
longer by this familiar process of reading? 

Shall I enjoy friendships there, wanting the 
smiling indications which point me to them 
here, — the recognisable face, — the "sweet as- 
surance of a look?" 

In Winter this intolerable disinclination to 
dying — to give it its mildest name — does more 
especially haunt and beset me. In a genial 
August noon, beneath a sweltering sky, death 
is almost problematic. At those times do such 
poor snakes as myself enjoy an immortality. 
Then we expand and burgeon. Then we are 
as strong again, as valiant again, as wise again, 
and a great deal taller. The blast that nips 
and shrinks me, puts me in thoughts of death. 

17 



Charles Lamb 

All things allied to the insubstantial wait upon 
that master feeling, — cold, numbness, dreams, 
perplexity, moonlight itself, with its shadowy 
and spectral appearances, — that cold ghost of 
the sun, or Phcebus's sickly sister, like that in- 
nutritious one denounced in the Canticles : — I 
am none of her minions; I hold with the Per- 
sian. 

Whatsoever thwarts, or puts me out of my 
way, brings death into my mind. All partial 
evils, like humours, run into that capital 
plague-sore. I have heard some profess an in- 
difference to life. Such hail the end of their 
existence as a port of refuge ; and speak of the 
grave as of some soft arms, in which they may 
slumber as on a pillow. Some have wooed 
Death; but out upon thee, I say, thou foul, 
ugly phantom! I detest, abhor, execrate, and 
(with Friar John) give thee to six score thou- 
sand devils, as in no instance to be excused or 
tolerated, but shunned as an universal viper, — 
to be branded, proscribed, and spoken evil of ! 
In no way can I be brought to digest thee, 
thou thin, melancholy Privation, or more 
frightful and confounding Positive! 

Those antidotes, prescribed against the fear 
of thee, are altogether frigid and insulting, like 
thyself. For what satisfaction hath a man, that 
he shall "lie down with kings and emperors in 
death," who in his lifetime never greatly cov- 
eted the society of such bedfellows? — or, for- 
sooth, that "so shall the fairest face appear?" — 
18 



Essays 



why, to comfort me, must Alice W n be a 

goblin? More than all, I conceive disgust at 
those impertinent and misbecoming familiari- 
ties inscribed upon your ordinary tombstones. 
Every deadman must take upon himself to be 
lecturing me with his odious truism, that 
"Such as he now is I must shortly be." Not 
so shortly, friend, perhaps, as thou imaginest. 
In the meantime I am alive. I move about. 
I am worth twenty of thee. Know thy bet- 
ters ! Thy New Years' days are past. I sur- 
vive, a jolly candidate for 182 1. Another cup 
of wine ! — and while that turncoat bell, that 
just now mournfully chanted the obsequies of 
1820 departed, with changed notes lustily rings 
in a successor, let us attune to its peal the song 
made on a like occasion, by hearty, cheerful 
Mr. Cotton:— 

THE NEW YEAR 

Hark ! the cock crows ! and yon bright star 
Tells us, the day himself s not far. 
And see where, breaking from the night, 
He gilds the western hills with light! 
With him old Janus doth appear, 
Peeping into the future year, 
With such a look as seems to say 
The prospect is not good that way. 
Thus do we rise ill sights to see, 
And 'gainst ourselves do prophesy; 
When the prophetic fear of things 
A more tormenting mischief brings, 
More full of soul-tormenting gall 
Than direst mischiefs can befall. 

19 



Charles Lamb 

But stay ! but stay ! methinks my sight 

Better inform'd by clearer light, 

Discerns sereneness in that brow, 

That all contracted seem'd but now. 

His revers'd face may show distaste, 

And frown upon the ills are past; 

But that which this way looks is clear, 

And smiles upon the New-born Year. 

He looks too from a place so high, 

The year lies open to his eye; 

And all the moments open are 

To the exact discoverer. 

Yet more and more he smiles upon 

The happy revolution. 

Why should we then suspect or fear 

The influences of a year, 

So smiles upon us the first morn, 

And speaks us good so soon as born? 

Plague on't ! the last was ill enough, 

This cannot but make better proof; 

Or, at the worst, as we brush' d through 

The last, why so we may this too ; 

And then the next in reason shou'd 

Be superexcellently good : 

For the worst ills (we daily see) 

Have no more perpetuity 

Than the best fortunes that do fall ; 

Which also bring us wherewithal 

Longer their being to support, 

Than those do of the other sort : 

And who has one good year in three, 

And yet repines at destiny, 

Appears ungrateful in the case, 

And merits not the good he has. 

Then let us welcome the New Guest 

With lusty brimmers of the best ; 

Mirth always should Good Fortune meet, 

And renders e'en Disaster sweet : 

And though the Princess turn her back, 

Let us but line ourselves with sack, 

20 



Essays 



We better shall by far hold out, 
Till the next Year she face about. 

How say you, reader — do not these verses 
smack of the rough magnanimity of the old 
English vein? Do they not fortify like a cor- 
dial ; enlarging the heart, and productive of 
sweet blood, and generous spirits, in the con- 
coction? Where be those puling fears of 
death, just now expressed or affected? — 
Passed like a cloud — absorbed in the purging 
sunlight of clear poetry — clean washed away 
by a wave of genuine Helicon, your only Spa 
for these hypochondries. And now another 
cup of the generous! and a merry New Year, 
and many of them to you all, my masters ! 



IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES 

I am of a constitution so general, that it con- 
sorts and sympathizeth with all things. I have 
no antipathy, or rather idiosyncrasy in any 
thing. Those natural repugnancies do not 
touch me; nor do I behold with prejudice the 
French, Italian, Spaniard, or Dutch. — Religio 
Medici. 

That the author of the Religio Medici, 
mounted upon the airy stilts of abstraction, 
conversant about notional and conjectural es- 
sences, in whose categories of Being the pos- 
sible took the upper hand of the actual, should 
have overlooked the impertinent individualities 

21 



Charles Lamb 

of such poor concretions as mankind, is not 
much to be admired. It is rather to be won- 
dered at, that in the genus of animals he should 
have condescended to distinguish that species at 
all. For myself, — earthbound and fettered to 
the scene of my activities, — 

Standing on earth, not rapt above the sky, 

I confess that I do feel the differences of man- 
kind, national or individual, to an unhealthy 
excess. I can look with no indifferent eye upon 
things or persons. Whatever is, is to me a 
matter of taste or distaste ; or when once it be- 
comes indifferent, it begins to be disrelishing. 
I am, in plainer words, a bundle of prejudices 
— made up of likings and dislikings — the veri- 
est thrall to sympathies, apathies, antipathies. 
In a certain sense, I hope it may be said of me 
that I am a lover of my species. I can feel for 
all indifferently, but I cannot feel towards all 
equally. The more purely English word that 
expresses sympathy, will better explain my 
meaning. I can be a friend to a worthy man, 
who upon another account cannot be my mate 
or fellow. I cannot like all people alike. 1 



*I would be understood as confining myself to 
the subject of imperfect sympathies. To na- 
tions or classes of men there can be no direct 
antipathy. There may be individuals born and 
constellated so opposite to another individual 
nature, that the same sphere cannot hold them. 
I have met with my moral antipodes, and can 



Essays 



I have been trying all my life to like Scotch- 
men, and am obliged to desist from the experi- 
ment in despair. They cannot like me ; and in 
truth, I never knew one of that nation who at- 
tempted to do it. There is something more 
plain and ingenuous in their mode of proceed- 
ing. We know one another at first sight. 
There is an order of imperfect intellects (under 
which mine must be content to rank) which in 
its constitution is essentially anti-Caledonian. 
The owners of the sort of faculties I allude to 



believe the story of two persons meeting (who 
never saw one another before in their lives) 
and instantly fighting. 

■We by proof find there should be 



'Twixt man and man such an antipathy, 
That though he can show no just reason why 
For any former wrong or injury, 
Can neither find a blemish in his fame, 
Nor aught in face or feature justly blame, 
Can challenge or accuse him of no evil, 
Yet notwithstanding hates him as a devil. 

The lines are from old Heywood's "Hie- 
rarchie of Angels," and he subjoins a curious 
story in confirmation, of a Spaniard who at- 
tempted to assassinate a King Ferdinand of 
Spain, and being put to the rack could give no 
other reason for the deed but an inveterate 
antipathy which he had taken to the first sight 
of the King. 

The cause which to that act compell'd 

him 
Was, he ne'er loved him since he first beheld 

him. 

23 



Charles Lamb 

have minds rather suggestive than comprehen- 
sive. They have no pretences to much clear- 
ness or precision in their ideas, or in their man- 
ner of expressing them. Their intellectual 
wardrobe (to confess fairly) has few whole 
pieces in it. They are content with fragments 
and scattered pieces of Truth. She presents no 
full front to them — a feature or side-face at 
the most. Hints and glimpses, germs and crude 
essays at a system, is the utmost they pretend 
to. They beat up a little game peradventure, 
and leave it to knottier heads, more robust con- 
stitutions, to run it down. The light that lights 
them is not steady and polar, but mutable and 
shifting: waxing, and again waning. Their 
conversation is accordingly. They will throw 
out a random word in or out of season, and be 
content to let it pass for what it is worth. They 
cannot speak always as if they were upon their 
oath, but must be understood, speaking or writ- 
ing, with some abatement. They seldom wait 
to mature a proposition, but e'en bring it to 
market in the green ear. They delight to im- 
part their defective discoveries as they arise, 
without waiting for their full development. 
They are no systematizers, and would but err 
more by attempting it. Their minds, as I said 
before, are suggestive merely. The brain of a 
true Caledonian (if I am not mistaken) is con- 
stituted upon quite a different plan. His 
Minerva is born in panoply. You are never ad- 
mitted to see his ideas in their growth — if in- 
24 



Essays 



deed they do grow, and are not rather put to- 
gether upon principles of clock-work. You 
never catch his mind in an undress. He never 
hints or suggests anything, but unlades his 
stock of ideas in perfect order and complete- 
ness. He brings his total wealth into com- 
pany, and gravely unpacks it. His riches are 
always about him. He never stoops to catch a 
glittering something in your presence to share 
it with you, before he quite knows whether it 
be true touch or not. You cannot cry halves 
to anything that he finds. He does not find, 
but bring. You never witness his first appre- 
hension of a thing. His understanding is al- 
ways at its meridian : you never see the first 
dawn, the early streaks. He has no falterings 
of self-suspicion. Surmises, guesses, misgiv- 
ings, half-intuitions, semi-consciousness, par- 
tial illuminations, dim instincts, embryo con- 
ceptions, have no place in his brain or vocabu- 
lary. The twilight of dubiety never falls upon 
him. Is he orthodox — he has no doubts. Is 
he an infidel — he has none either. Between 
the affirmative and the negative there is no 
border-land with him. You cannot hover with 
Him upon the confines of truth, or wander in 
the maze of a probable argument. , He always 
keeps the path. You cannot make excursions 
with him, for he sets you right. His taste 
never fluctuates. His morality never abates. 
He cannot compromise, or understand mid- 
dle actions. There can be but a right 

25 



Charles Lamb 

and a wrong. His conversation is as a 
book. His affirmations have the sanctity of an 
oath. You must speak upon the square with 
him. He stops a metaphor like a suspected 
person in an enemy's country. "A healthy 
book !" — said one of his countrymen to me, 
who had ventured to give that appellation to 
John Buncle, — "Did I catch rightly what you 
said? I have heard of a man in health, and 
of a healthy state of body, but I do not see 
how that epithet can be properly applied to a 
book." Above all, you must beware of indi- 
rect expressions before a Caledonian. Clap an 
extinguisher upon your irony if you are un- 
happily blest with a vein of it. Remember you 
are upon your oath. I have a print of a grace- 
ful female after Leonardo da Vinci, which I 
was showing off to Mr. * * *. After he had ex- 
amined it minutely, I ventured to ask him how 
he liked my beauty, (a foolish name it goes by 
among my friends,) when he very gravely as- 
sured me that "he had considerable respect for 
my character and talents," (so he was pleased 
to say,) "but had not given himself much 
thought about the degree of my personal pre- 
tensions." The misconception staggered me, 
but did not seem much to disconcert him. Per- 
sons of this nation are particularly fond of af- 
firming a truth, which nobody doubts. They 
do not so properly affirm as annunciate it. 
They do indeed appear to have such a love of 
truth (as if, like virtue, it were valuable for 
26 



Essays 



itself) that all truth becomes equally valuable, 
whether the proposition that contains it be new 
or old, disputed, or such as is impossible to be- 
come a subject of disputation. I was present 
not long since at a party of North Britons, 
where a son of Burns was expected, and hap- 
pened to drop a silly expression (in my South 
British way,) that I wished it were the father 
instead of the son — when four of them started 
up at once to inform me that "that was im- 
possible, because he was dead." An imprac- 
ticable wish, it seems, was more than they 
could conceive. Swift has hit off this part of 
their character, namely their love of truth, in 
his biting way, but with an illiberality that 
necessarily confines the passage to the margin. 1 
The tediousness of these people is certainly 
provoking. I wonder if they ever tire one an- 
other ! — In my early life I had a passionate 
fondness for the poetry of Burns. I have some- 
times foolishly hoped to ingratiate myself with 

^here are some people who think they suf- 
ficiently acquit themselves, and entertain their 
company, with relating facts of no consequence, 
not at all out of the road of such common inci- 
dents as happen every day ; and this I have ob- 
served more frequently among the Scots than 
any other nation, who are very careful not to 
omit the minutest circumstances of time or 
place: which kind of discourse, if it were not a 
little relieved by the uncouth terms and 
phrases, as well as accent and gesture, peculiar 
to that country, would be hardly tolerable. — 
Hints towards an Essay on Conversation. 

27 



Charles Lamb 

his countrymen by expressing it. But I have 
always found that a true Scot resents your ad- 
miration of his compatriot, even more than he 
would your contempt of him. The latter he 
imputes to your "imperfect acquaintance with 
many of the words which he uses ;" and the 
same objection makes it a presumption in you 
to suppose that you can admire him. Thom- 
son they seem to have forgotten. Smollett they 
have neither forgotten nor forgiven, for his 
delineation of Rory and his companion, upon 
their first introduction to our metropolis. 
Speak of Smollett as a great genius, and they 
will retort upon you Hume's History com- 
pared with his Continuation of it. What if the 
historian had continued Humphrey Clinker? 

I have, in the abstract, no disrespect for Jews. 
They are a piece of stubborn antiquity, com- 
pared with which Stonehenge is in its nonage. 
They date beyond the pyramids. But I should 
not care to be in habits of familiar intercourse 
with any of that nation. I confess that I have 
not the nerves to enter their synagogues. Old 
prejudices cling about me. I cannot shake off 
the story of Hugh of Lincoln. Centuries of in- 
jury, contempt, and hate, on the one side, — of 
cloaked revenge, dissimulation, and hate, on 
the other, between our and their fathers, must 
and ought to affect the blood of the children. I 
cannot believe it can run clear and kindly yet; 
or that a few fine words, such as candour, lib- 
erality, the light of a nineteenth century, can 
28 



Essays 

close up the breaches of so deadly a disunion. 
A Hebrew is nowhere congenial to me. He is 
least distasteful on 'Change, for the mercan- 
tile spirit levels all distinctions, as all are beau- 
ties in the dark. I boldly confess that I do not 
relish the approximation of Jew and Chris- 
tian, which has become so fashionable. The re- 
ciprocal endearments have, to me, something 
hypocritical and unnatural in them. I do not 
like to see the Church and Synagogue kissing 
and congeeing in awkward postures of an af- 
fected civility. If they are converted, why do 
they not come over to us altogether? Why 
keep up a form of separation, when the life of 
it is fled? If they can sit with us at table, why 
do they keck at our cookery? I do not under- 
stand these half convertities. Jews christian- 
izing — Christians judaizing — puzzle me. I like 
fish or flesh. A moderate Jew is a more con- 
founding piece of anomaly than a wet Quaker. 
The spirit of the synagogue is essentially sepa- 
rative. B would have been more in 

keeping if he had abided by the faith of his 
forefathers. There is a fine scorn in his face, 
which nature meant to be of Christians. The 
Hebrew spirit is strong in him, in spite of his 
proselytism. He cannot conquer the Shibboleth. 
How it breaks out, when he sings, "The Chil- 
dren of Israel passed through the Red Sea !" 
The auditors, for the moment, are as Egyp- 
tians to him, and he rides over our necks in 

triumph. There is no mistaking him. B 

29 



Charles Lamb 

has a strong expression of sense in his counte- 
nance, and it is confirmed by his singing. The 
foundation of his vocal excellence is sense. He 
sings with understanding, as Kemble delivered 
dialogue. He would sing the Commandments, 
and give an appropriate character to each pro- 
hibition. His nation, in general, have not over- 
sensible countenances. How should they? — but 
you seldom see a silly expression among them. 
Gain, and the pursuit of gain, sharpen a man's 
visage. I never heard of an idiot being born 
among them. Some admire the Jewish female 
physiognomy. I admire it, but with trembling. 
Jael had those full, dark, inscrutable eyes. 

In the Negro countenance you will often 
meet with strong traits of benignity. I have felt 
yearnings of tenderness towards some of these 
faces — or rather masks — that have looked out 
kindly upon one in casual encounters in the 
streets and highways. I love what Fuller 
beautifully calls these — "images of God cut in 
ebony." But I should not like to associate with 
them, to share my meals and my good-nights 
with them — because they are black. 

I love Quaker ways and Quaker worship. I 
venerate the Quaker principles. It does me 
good for the rest of the day when I meet any 
of their people in my path. When I am ruffled 
or disturbed by any occurrence, the sight or 
quiet voice of a Quaker acts upon me as a 
ventilator, lightening the air, and taking off a 
load from the bosom. But I cannot like the 
3o 



Essays 

Quakers (as Desdemona would say) "to live 
with them." I am all over sophisticated — with 
humours, fancies, craving hourly sympathy. I 
must have books, pictures, theatres, chit-chat, 
scandal, jokes, ambiguities, and a thousand 
whim-whams, which their simpler taste can do 
without. I should starve at their primitive 
banquet. My appetites are too high for the 
salads which (according to Evelyn) Eve 
dressed for the angel, my gusto too excited 

To sit a guest with Daniel at his pulse. 

The indirect answers which Quakers are 
often found to return to a question put to them 
may be explained, I think, without the vulgar 
assumption that they are more given to eva- 
sion and equivocating than other people. They 
naturally look to their words more carefully, 
and are more cautious of committing them- 
selves. They have a peculiar character to keep 
up on this head. They stand in a manner upon 
their veracity. A Quaker is by law exempted 
from taking an oath. The custom of resorting 
to an oath in extreme cases, sanctified as it is 
by all religious antiquity, is apt (it must be 
confessed) to introduce into the laxer sort of 
minds the notion of two kinds of truth — the 
one applicable to the solemn affairs of justice, 
and the other to the common proceedings of 
daily intercourse. As truth bound upon the 
conscience by an oath can be but truth, so in 
the common affirmations of the shop and tb'" 

3i 



Charles Lamb 

market-place a latitude is expected and con- 
ceded upon questions wanting this solemn cove- 
nant. Some thing less than truth satisfies. It 
is common to hear a person say, "You do not 
expect me to speak as if I were upon my oath." 
Hence a great deal of incorrectness and inad- 
vertency, short of falsehood, creeps into ordi- 
nary conversation ; and a kind of secondary or 
laic-truth is tolerated, where clergy-truth — 
oath-truth, by the nature of the circumstances, 
is not required. A Quaker knows none of this 
distinction. His simple affirmation being re- 
ceived, upon the most sacred occasions, without 
any further test, stamps a value upon the words 
which he is to use upon the most indifferent 
topics of life. He looks to them, naturally, with 
more severity. You can have of him no more 
than his word. He knows, if he is caught trip- 
ping in a casual expression, he forfeits, for 
himself, at least, his claim to the invidious ex- 
emption. He knows that his syllables are 
weighed ; and how far a consciousness of this 
particular watchfulness, exerted against a per- 
son, has a tendency to produce indirect an- 
swers, and a diverting of the question by hon- 
est means, might be illustrated, and the practice 
justified, by a more sacred example than is 
proper to be adduced upon this occasion. The 
admirable presence of mind, which is notorious 
in Quakers upon all contingencies, might be 
traced to this imposed self-watchfulness — if it 
did not seem rather an humble and secular 
32 



Essays 



scion of that old stock of religious constancy, 
which never bent or faltered, in the Primitive 
Friends, or gave way to the winds of persecu- 
tion, to the violence of judge or accuser, under 
trials and racking examinations. "You will 
never be the wiser if I sit here answering your 
questions till midnight," said one of those up- 
right Justicers to Penn, who had been putting 
law-cases with a puzzling subtlety. "Thereafter 
as the answers may be," retorted the Quaker. 
The astonishing composure of this people is 
sometimes ludicrously displayed in lighter in- 
stances. I was travelling in a stage-coach with 
three male Quakers, buttoned up in the strait- 
est non-conformity of their sect. We stopped 
to bait at Andover, where a meal, partly tea 
apparatus, partly supper, was set before us. My 
friends confined themselves to the tea-table. I 
in my way took supper. When the landlady 
brought in the bill, the eldest of my companions 
discovered that she had charged for both meals. 
This was resisted. Mine hostess was very clam- 
ourous and positive. Some mild arguments were 
used on the part of the Quakers, for which the 
heated mind of the good lady seemed by no 
means a fit recipient. The guard came in with 
his usual peremptory notice. The Quakers 
pulled out their money and formally tendered 
it — so much for tea. I, in humble imitation, 
tendering mine for the supper which I had 
taken. She would not relax in her demand. 
So they all three quietly put up their silver, as 
33 



Charles Lamb 

did myself, and marched out of the room, the 
eldest and gravest going first, with myself clos- 
ing up the rear, who thought I could not do 
better than follow the example of such grave 
and warrantable personages. We got in. The 
steps went up. The coach drove off. The 
murmurs of mine hostess, not very indistinctly 
or ambiguously pronounced, became after a 
time inaudible ; and now my conscience, which 
the whimsical scene had for a while suspended, 
beginning to give some twitches, I waited, in 
the hope that some justification would be of- 
fered by these serious persons for the seeming 
injustice of their conduct. To my great sur- 
prise not a syllable was dropped on the subject. 
They sat as mute as at a meeting. At length 
the eldest of them broke silence, by inquiring 
of his next neighbour, "Hast thee heard how 
indigos go at the India House?" and the ques- 
tion operated as a soporific on my moral feeling 
as far as Exeter. 

DREAM CHILDREN ; A REVERIE 

Children love to listen to stories about their 
elders, when they were children; to stretch 
their imagination to the conception of a tradi- 
tionary great-uncle or grandame whom they 
never saw. It was in this spirit that my little 
ones crept about me the other evening to hear 
about their great-grandmother Field, who lived 
in a great house in Norfolk, (a hundred times 
34 



Essays 



bigger than that in which they and papa lived,) 
which had been the scene (so at least it was 
generally believed in that part of the country) 
of the tragic incidents which they had lately 
become familiar with from the ballad of the 
Children in the Wood. Certain it is that the 
whole story of the children and their uncle was 
to be seen fairly carved out in wood upon the 
chimney-piece of the great hall, the whole story 
down to the Robin Redbreasts; till a foolish 
rich person pulled it down to set up a marble 
one of modern invention in its stead, with no 
story upon it. Here Alice put out one of her 
dear mother's looks, too tender to be called up- 
braiding. Then I went on to say how religious 
and how good their great-grandmother Field 
was, how beloved and respected by everybody, 
though she was not indeed the mistress of this 
great house, but had only the charge of it 
(and yet in some respects she might be said to 
be the mistress of it too) committed to her by 
the owner, who preferred living in a newer and 
more fashionable mansion which he had pur- 
chased somewhere in the adjoining county; but 
still she lived in it in a manner as if it had been 
her own, and kept up the dignity of the great 
house in a sort while she lived, which after- 
wards came to decay, and was nearly pulled 
down, and all its old ornaments stripped and 
carried away to the owner's other house, where 
they were set up, and looked as awkward as if 
some one were to carry away the old tombs 

35 



Charles Lamb 

they had seen lately at the Abbey, and stick 
them up in Lady C.'s tawdry gilt drawing- 
room. Here John smiled, as much as to say, 
"that would be foolish indeed." And then I 
told how, when she came to die, her funeral 
was attended by a concourse of all the poor, 
and some of the gentry too, of the neighbour- 
hood for many miles round, to show their re- 
spect for her memory, because she had been 
such a good and religious woman ; so good in- 
deed that she knew all the Psaltery by heart, 
ay, and a great part of the Testament besides. 
Here little Alice spread her hands. Then I told 
what a tall, upright, graceful person their 
great-grandmother Field once was ; and how in 
her youth she was esteemed the best dancer, 
(here Alice's little right foot played an invol- 
untary movement, till, upon my looking grave, 
it desisted,) the best dancer, I was saying, in 
the county, till a cruel disease, called a cancer, 
came, and bowed her down with pain; but it 
could never bend her good spirits, or make 
them stoop, but they were still upright, be- 
cause she was so good and religious. Then I 
told how she was used to sleep by herself in a 
lone chamber of the great lone house ; and how 
she believed that an apparition of two infants 
was to be seen at midnight gliding up and down 
the great staircase near where she slept, but 
she said "those innocents would do her no 
harm;" and how frightened I used to be, 
though in those days I had my maid to sleep 
36 



Essays 

with me, because I was never half so good or 
religious as she; and yet I never saw the in- 
fants. Here John expanded all his eyebrows 
and tried to look courageous. Then I told how 
good she was to all her grandchildren, having 
us to the great house in the holidays, where I 
in particular used to spend many hours by my- 
self, in gazing upon the old busts of the twelve 
Csesars, that had been Emperors of Rome, till 
the old marble heads would seem to live again, 
or I to be turned into marble with them; how 
I never could be tired with roaming about that 
huge mansion, with its vast empty rooms, with 
their worn-out hangings, fluttering tapestry, 
and carved oaken panels, with the gilding al- 
most rubbed out ; sometimes in the spacious 
old-fashioned gardens, which I had almost to 
myself, unless when now and then a solitary 
gardening man would cross me; and how the 
nectarines and peaches hung upon the walls, 
without my ever offering to pluck them, be- 
cause they were forbidden fruit, unless now 
and then ; and because I had more pleasure in 
strolling about among the old melancholy-look- 
ing yew-trees, or the firs, and picking up the 
red berries, and the fir-apples, which were good 
for nothing but to look at — or in lying about 
upon the fresh grass with all the fine garden 
smells around me — or basking in the orangery, 
till I could almost fancy myself ripening too 
along with the oranges and the limes in that 
grateful warmth — or in watching the dace that 

37 



Charles Lamb 

darted to and fro in the fish-pond at the bottom 
of the garden, with here and there a great sulky- 
pike hanging midway down the water in 
silent state, as if it mocked at their 
impertinent friskings, — I had more pleas- 
ure in these busy-idle diversions than in 
all the sweet flavours of peaches, nec- 
tarines, oranges, and such-like common 
baits for children. Here John slyly deposited 
back upon the plate a bunch of grapes, which, 
not unobserved by Alice, he had meditated di- 
viding with her, and both seemed willing to re- 
linquish them for the present as irrelevant. 
Then, in somewhat a more heightened tone, I 
told how, though their great-grandmother Field 
loved all her grandchildren, yet in an especial 
manner she might be said to love their uncle, 

John L , because he was so handsome and 

spirited a youth, and a king to the rest of us; 
and, instead of moping about in solitary cor- 
ners, like some of us, he would mount the most 
mettlesome horse he could get, when but an 
imp no bigger than themselves, and make it 
carry him half over the county in a morning, 
and join the hunters when there were any out; 
(and yet he loved the old great house and gar- 
dens too, but had too much spirit to be always 
pent up within their boundaries;) and how 
their uncle grew up to man's estate as brave as 
he was handsome, to the admiration of every- 
body, but of their great-grandmother Field 
most especially; and how he used to carry me 
38 



Essays 



upon his back when I was a lame-footed boy, 
(for he was a good bit older than I,) many a 
mile when I could not walk for pain ; and how 
in after life he became lame-footed too, and 
I did not always, I fear, make allowances 
enough for him when he was impatient, and in 
pain, nor remember sufficiently how considerate 
he had been to me when I was lame-footed ; 
and how when he died, though he had not been 
dead an hour, it seemed as if he had died a 
great while ago, such a distance there is be- 
twixt life and death ; and how I bore his death 
as I thought pretty well at first, but afterwards 
it haunted and haunted me ; and though I did 
not cry or take it to heart as some do, and as 
I think he would have done if I had died, yet 
I missed him all day long, and knew not till 
then how much I had loved him. I missed his 
kindness, and I missed his crossness, and 
wished him to be alive again, to be quarrelling 
with him, (for we quarrelled sometimes,) rather 
than not have him again, and was as uneasy 
without him as he their poor uncle, must have 
been when the doctor took off his limb. — Here 
the children fell a crying, and asked if their 
little mourning which they had on was not for 
Uncle John, and they looked up, and prayed me 
not to go on about their uncle, but to tell them 
some stories about their pretty dead mother. 
Then I told how for seven long years, in hope 
sometimes, sometimes in despair, yet persisting 
ever, I courted the fair Alice W n; and, 

39 



Charles Lamb 

as much as children could understand, I ex- 
plained to them what coyness, and difficulty, 
and denial, meant in maidens — when suddenly, 
turning to Alice, the soul of the first Alice 
looked out at her eyes with such a reality of 
re-presentment, that I became in doubt which 
of them stood there before me, or whose that 
bright hair was ; and while I stood gazing, both 
the children gradually grew fainter to my view, 
receding, and still receding, till nothing at last 
but two mournful features were seen in the 
uttermost distance, which, without speech, 
strangely impressed upon me the effects of 
speech : "We are not of Alice, nor of thee, nor 
are we children at all. The children of Alice 
call Bartrum father. We are nothing; less 
than nothing, and dreams. We are only what 
might have been, and must wait upon the tedi- 
ous shores of Lethe millions of ages before we 
have existence and a name" and immedi- 
ately awaking, I found myself quietly seated in 
my bachelor arm-chair, where I had fallen 
asleep, with the faithful Bridget unchanged by 
my side; but John L. (or James Elia) was gone 
forever. 

A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG 

Mankind, says a Chinese manuscript, which 

my friend M was obliging enough to 

read and explain to me, for the first seventy 

thousand ages ate their meat raw, clawing or 

40 



Essays 



biting it from the living animal, just as they 
do in Abyssinia to this day. This period is not 
obscurely hinted at by their great Confucius in 
the second chapter of his Mundane Mutations, 
where he designates a kind of golden age by 
the term Cho-fang, literally the Cooks' Holi- 
day. The manuscript goes on to say, that the 
art of roasting, or rather broiling (which I 
take to be the elder brother) was accidentally 
discovered in the manner following. The 
swine-herd Ho-ti, having gone out into the 
woods one morning, as his manner was, to col- 
lect mast for his hogs, left his cottage in the 
care of his eldest son, Bo-bo, a great lubberly 
boy, who being fond of playing with fire, as 
younkers of his age commonly are, let some 
sparks escape into a bundle of straw, which 
kindling quickly, spread the conflagration over 
every part of their poor mansion, till it was re- 
duced to ashes. Together with the cottage, (a 
sorry antediluvian make-shift of a building, 
you may think it,) what was of much more im- 
portance, a fine litter of new-farrowed pigs, no 
less than nine in number, perished. China pigs 
have been esteemed a luxury all over the East, 
from the remotest periods that we read of. 
Bo-bo was in the utmost consternation, as you 
may think, not so much for the sake of the 
tenement, which his father and he could easily 
build up again with a few dry branches, and 
the labour of an hour or two at any time, as 
for the loss of the pigs. While he was thinking 

41 



Charles Lamb 

what he should say to his father, and wringing 
his hands over the smoking remnants of one 
of those untimely sufferers, an odour assailed 
his nostrils, unlike any scent which he had be- 
fore experienced. What could it proceed from ? 
Not from the burnt cottage : he had smelt that 
smell before ; indeed this was by no means the 
first accident of the kind which had occurred 
through the negligence of this unlucky young 
fire-brand. Much less did it resemble that of 
any known herb, weed, or flower. A premoni- 
tory moistening at the same time overflowed 
his nether lip. He knew not what to think. He 
next stooped down to feel the pig, if there were 
any signs of life in it. He burnt his fingers, and 
to cool them he applied them in his booby fash- 
ion to his mouth. Some of the crumbs of the 
scorched skin had come away with his fingers, 
and for the first time in his life, (in the world's 
life indeed, for before him no man had known 
it,) he tasted crackling! Again he felt and 
fumbled at the pig. It did not burn him so 
much now, still he licked his fingers from a sort 
of habit. The truth at length broke into ftis 
slow understanding, that it was the pig that 
smelt so, and the pig that tasted so delicious; 
and surrendering himself up to the new-born 
pleasure, he fell to tearing up whole handfulls 
of the scorched skin with the flesh next it, and 
was cramming it down his throat in his beastly 
fashion, when his sire entered amid the smok- 
ing rafters, armed with retributory cudgel, and 
42 



Essays 



finding how affairs stood, began to rain blows 
upon the young rogue's shoulders as thick as 
hail-stones, which Bo-bo heeded not any more 
than if they had been flies. The tickling pleas- 
ure which he experienced in his lower regions 
had rendered him quite callous to any incon- 
veniences he might feel in those remote quar- 
ters. His father might lay on, but he could not 
beat him from his pig, till he had fairly made 
an end of it, when, becoming a little more 
sensible of his situation, something like the 
following dialogue ensued : — 

"You graceless whelp, what have you got 
there devouring? Is it not enough that you 
have burnt me down three houses with your 
dog's tricks, and be hanged to you! but you 
must be eating fire, and I know not what. What 
have you got there, I say?" 

"O father, the pig, the pig! do come and 
taste how nice the burnt pig eats." 

The ears of Ho-ti tingled with horror. He 
cursed his son, and he cursed himself that ever 
he should beget a son that should eat burnt 

pig- 

Bo-bo, whose scent was wonderfully sharp- 
ened since morning, soon raked out another pig, 
and fairly rending it asunder, thrust the lesser 
half by main force into the fists of Ho-ti, still 
shouting out, "Eat, eat, eat the burnt pig, 
father, only taste — O Lord !" — with such-like 
barbarous ejaculations, cramming all the while 
as if he would choke. 

43 



Charles Lamb 

Ho-ti trembled every joint while he grasped 
the abominable thing, wavering whether he 
should not put his son to death for an unnat- 
ural young monster, when the crackling scorch- 
ing his fingers, as it had done his son's, and ap- 
plying the same remedy to them, he in his turn 
tasted some of its flavour, which, make what 
sour mouths he would for a pretence, proved 
not altogether displeasing to him. In conclu- 
sion, (for the manuscript here is a little tedi- 
ous,) both father and son fairly sat down to 
the mess, and never left off till they had de- 
spatched all that remained of the litter. 

Bo-bo was strictly enjoined not to let the se- 
cret escape, for the neighbours would certainly 
have stoned them for a couple of abominable 
wretches, who could think of improving upon 
the good meat which God had sent them. Nev- 
ertheless, strange stories got about. It was ob- 
served that Ho-ti's cottage was burnt down 
now more frequently than ever. Nothing but 
fires from this time forward. Some would 
break out in broad, day, others in the night- 
time. As often as the sow farrowed, so sure 
was the house of Ho-ti to be in a blaze; and 
Ho-ti himself, which was the more remarkable, 
instead of chastising his son, seemed to grow 
more indulgent to him than ever. At length 
they were watched, the terrible mystery discov- 
ered, and father and son summoned to take 
their trial at Pekin, then an inconsiderable as- 
size town. Evidence was given, the obnoxious 

44 



Essays 



food itself produced in court, and verdict about 
to be pronounced, when the foreman of the jury- 
begged that some of the burnt pig, of which the 
culprits stood accused, might be handed into 
the box. He handled it, and they all handled 
it; and burning their fingers, as Bo-bo and his 
father had done before them, and nature 
prompting to each of them the same remedy, 
against the face of all the facts, and the clearest 
charge which judge had ever given, — to the 
surprise of the whole court, townsfolk, 
strangers, reporters, and all present — without 
leaving the box, or any manner of consultation 
whatever, they brought in a simultaneous ver- 
dict of Not Guilty. 

The judge, who was a shrewd fellow, winked 
at the manifest iniquity of the decision : and 
when the court was dismissed, went privily and 
bought up all the pigs that could be had for 
love or money. In a few days his lordship's 
town-house was observed to be on fire. The 
thing took wing, and now there was nothing to 
be seen but fire in every direction. Fuel and 
pigs grew enormously dear all over the district. 
The insurance-offices, one and all, shut up 
shop. People built slighter and slighter every 
day, until it was feared that the very science of 
architecture would in no long time be lost to 
the world. Thus this custom of firing houses 
continued, till in process of time, says my 
manuscript, a sage arose, like our Locke, who 
made a discovery that the flesh of swine, or in- 

45 



Charles Lamb 

deed of any other animal, might be cooked 
(burnt, as they called it,) without the ne- 
cessity of consuming a whole house to dress it. 
Then first began the rude form of a gridiron. 
Roasting by the string or spit came in a century 
or two later, I forget in whose dynasty. By 
such slow degrees, concludes the manuscript, 
do the most useful and seemingly the most ob- 
vious, arts make their way among mankind. 

Without placing too implicit faith in the ac- 
count above given, it must be agreed that if a 
worthy pretext for so dangerous an experi- 
ment as setting houses on fire (especially in 
these days) could be assigned in favour of any 
culinary object, that pretext and excuse might 
be found in roast pig. 

Of all the delicacies in the whole mundus edi- 
bilis, I will maintain it to be the most delicate 
— princeps obsoniorum. 

I speak not of your grown porkers — things 
between pig and pork, those hobbydehoys — but 
a young and tender suckling, under a moon old, 
guiltless as yet of the sty, with no original 
speck of the amor immunditicu, the hereditary 
failing of the first parent, yet manifest — his 
voice as yet not broken, but something between 
a childish treble and a grumble — the mild fore- 
runner or prceludium of a grunt. 

He must be roasted. I am not ignorant that 
our ancestors ate them seethed, or boiled; but 
what a sacrifice of the exterior tegument ! 

There is no flavour comparable, I will con- 
46 



Essays 



tend, to that of the crisp, tawny, well-watched, 
not over-roasted, crackling, as it is well called. 
The very teeth are invited to their share of the 
pleasure at this banquet in overcoming the coy, 
brittle resistance — with the adhesive oleaginous 
— O call it not fat ! but an indefinable sweet- 
ness growing up to it — the tender blossoming 
of fat — fat cropped in the bud — taken in the 
shoot — in the first innocence — the cream and 
quintessence of the child-pig's yet pure food — 
the lean, no lean, but a kind of animal manna — 
or, rather, fat and lean (if it must be so) so 
blended and running into each other, that both 
together make but one ambrosian result, or 
common substance. 

Behold him, while he is "doing" — it seemeth 
rather a refreshing warmth than a scorching 
heat that he is so passive to. How equably he 
twirleth round the string! — Now he is just 
done. To see the extreme sensibility of that 
tender age ! he hath wept out his pretty eyes — 
radiant jellies — shooting stars. — 

See him in the dish, his second cradle, how 
meek he lieth ! — Wouldst thou have had this in- 
nocent grow up to the grossness and indocility 
which too often accompany maturer swine- 
hood? Ten to one he would have proved a 
glutton, a sloven, an obstinate, disagreeable 
animal, wallowing in all manner of filthy con- 
versation. From these sins he is happily 
snatched away. 



47 



Charles Lamb 

Ere sin could blight or sorrow fade, 
Death came with timely care. 

His memory is odouriferous. No clown curseth, 
while his stomach half rejecteth, the rank ba- 
con ; no coal-heaver bolteth him in reeking sau- 
sages; he hath a fair sepulchre in the grateful 
stomach of the judicious epicure, and for such 
a tomb might be content to die. 

He is the best of sapors. Pine-apple is great. 
She is indeed almost too transcendent, — a de- 
light, if not sinful, yet so like to sinning that 
really a tender-conscienced person would do 
well to pause, — too ravishing for mortal taste, 
she woundeth and excoriateth the lips that ap- 
proach her. Like lovers' kisses, she biteth : she 
is a pleasure bordering on pain from the fierce- 
ness and insanity of her relish ; but she stoppeth 
at the palate; she meddleth not with the appe- 
tite; and the coarsest hunger might barter her 
consistently for a mutton-chop. 

Pig (let me speak his praise) is no less pro- 
vocative of the appetite than he is satisfactory 
to the criticalness of the censorious palate. The 
strong man may batten on him, and the weak- 
ling refuseth not his mild juices. 

Unlike to mankind's mixed characters, a 
bundle of virtues and vices, inexplicably inter- 
twisted, and not to be unravelled without 
hazard, he is good throughout. No part of him 
is better or worse than another. He helpeth, as 
far as his little means extend, all around. He 
48 



Essays 



is the least envious of banquets. He is all 
neighbours' fare. 

I am one of those who freely and ungrudg- 
ingly impart a share of the good things of this 
life which fall to their lot (few as mine are in 
this kind) to a friend, I protest I take as great 
an interest in my friend's pleasures, his rel- 
ishes, and proper satisfactions, as in mine own. 
"Presents," I often say, "endear Absents." 
Hares, pheasants, partridges, snipes, barn-door 
chickens, (those "tame villatic fowl,") capons, 
plovers, brawn, barrels of oysters, I dispense as 
freely as I receive them. I love to taste them, 
as it were, upon the tongue of my friend. But 
a stop must be put somewhere. One would not, 
like Lear, "give everything." I make my stand 
upon pig. Methinks it is an ingratitude to the 
giver of all good flavours to extra-domiciliate, 
or send out of the house slightingly (under pre- 
text of friendship, or I know not what,) a 
blessing so particularly adapted, predestined, I 
may say, to my individual palate. — It argues an 
insensibility. 

I remember a touch of conscience in this kind 
at school. My good old aunt, who never parted 
from me at the end of a holiday without 
stuffing a sweetmeat, or some nice thing into 
my pocket, had dismissed me one evening with 
a smoking plum-cake, fresh from the oven. In 
my way to school (it was over London bridge) 
a grey-headed old beggar saluted me. (I have 
no doubt, at this time of day, that he v/as a 
49 



Charles Lamb 

counterfeit.) I had no pence to console him 
with, and in the vanity of self-denial, and the 
very coxcombry of charity, schoolboy-like, I 
made him a present of the whole cake. I 
walked on a little, buoyed up, as one is on such 
occasions, with a sweet soothing of self-satis- 
faction ; but before I had got to the end of the 
bridge my better feelings returned, and I burst 
into tears, thinking how ungrateful I had been 
to my good aunt, to go and give her good gift 
away to a stranger that I had never seen before, 
and who might be a bad man for aught I knew ; 
and then I thought of the pleasure my aunt 
would be taking in thinking that I (I myself, 
and not another) would eat her nice cake. And 
what should I say to her the next time I saw 
her? — how naughty I was to part with her 
pretty present! — and the odour of that spicy 
cake came back upon my recollection, and the 
pleasure and the curiosity I had taken in seeing 
her make it, and her joy when she sent it to the 
oven, and how disappointed she would feel that 
I had never had a bit of it in my mouth at last. 
And I blamed my impertinent spirit of alms- 
giving, and out-of-place hypocrisy of goodness ; 
and above all, I wished never to see the face 
again of that insidious, good-for-nothing, old 
grey impostor. 

Our ancestors were nice in their method of 

sacrificing these tender victims. We read of 

pigs whipt to death with something of a shock, 

as we hear of any other obsolete custom. The 

SO 



Essays 



age of discipline is gone by, or it would be curi- 
ous to inquire (in a philosophical light merely) 
what effect this process might have towards in- 
tegrating and dulcifying a substance naturally 
so mild and dulcet as the flesh of young pigs. 
It looks like refining a violet. Yet we should 
be cautious, while we condemn the inhumanity 
how we censure the wisdom of the practice. It 
might impart a gusto. 

I remember an hypothesis, argued upon by 
the young students when I was at St. Omer's, 
and maintained with much learning and pleas- 
antry on both sides, "Whether, supposing that 
the flavour of a pig who obtained his death by 
whipping {per Hagellationem extremam) su- 
peradded a pleasure upon the palate of a man 
more intense than any possible suffering we 
can conceive in the animal, is man justified in 
using that method of putting the animal to 
death?" I forget the decision. 

His sauce should be considered : decidedly, a 
few bread crumbs, done up with his liver and 
brains, and a dash of mild sage. But banish, 
dear Mrs. Cook, I beseech you, the whole onion 
tribe. Barbecue your whole hogs to your palate, 
steep them in shalots, stuff them out with plan- 
tations of the rank and guilty garlic ; you can- 
not poison them, or make them stronger than 
they are; but consider, he is a weakling, — a 
flower. 



5i 



Charles Lamb 



ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS 

The casual sight of an old Play Bill, which I 
picked up the other day — I know not by what 
chance it was preserved so long — tempts me to 
call to mind a few of the Players who make 
the principal figure in it. It presents the cast 
of parts in the Twelfth Night, at the old Drury 
Lane Theatre two-and-thirty years ago. There 
is something very touching in these old re- 
membrances. They make us think how we once 
used to read a Play Bill — not, as now perad- 
venture, singling out a favourite performer, 
and casting a negligent eye over the rest; but 
spelling out every name, down to the very 
mutes and servants of the scene; when it was 
a matter of no small moment to us whether 
Whitfield, or Packer, took the part of Fabian ; 
when Benson, and Burton, and Phillimore — 
names of small account — had an importance be- 
yond what we can be content to attribute now 
to the time's best actors. "Orsino, by Mr. Bar- 
rymore." What a full Shakespearian sound it 
carries ! how fresh to memory arise the image 
and the manner of the gentle actor ! 

Those who have only seen Mrs. Jordan 
within the last ten or fifteen years can have no 
adequate notion of her performance of such 
parts as Ophelia; Helena, in All's Well that 
Ends Well; and Viola in this play. Her voice 
had latterly acquired a coarseness, which suited 
52 



Essays 

well enough with her Nells and Hoydens, but 
in those days it sank, with her steady, melting 
eye, into the heart. Her joyous parts, in which 
her memory now chiefly lives, in her youth 
were outdone by her plaintive ones. There is 
no giving an account how she delivered the dis- 
guised story of her love for Orsino. It was no 
set speech, that she had foreseen, so as to 
weave it into an harmonious period, line nec- 
essarily following line, to make up the music — 
yet I have heard it so spoken, or rather read, 
not without its grace and beauty — but, when 
she had declared her sister's history to be a 
"blank," and that she "never told her love," 
there was a pause, as if the story had ended — 
and then the image of the "worm in the bud," 
came up as a new suggestion — and the height- 
ened image of "Patience" still followed after 
that, as by some growing (and not mechanical) 
process, thought springing up after thought, I 
would almost say, as they were watered by her 
tears. So in those fine lines — 

Right loyal cantos of contemned love — 
Hollow your name to the reverberate hills — 

there was no preparation made in the foregoing 
image for that which was to follow. She used 
no rhetoric in her passion ; or it was Nature's 
own rhetoric, most legitimate then, when it 
seemed altogether without rule or law. 

Mrs. Powel (now Mrs. Renard), then in the 
pride of her beauty, made an admirable Olivia. 

53 



Charles Lamb 

She was particularly excellent in her unbend- 
ing scenes in conversation with the Clown. I 
have seen some Olivias — and those very sensi- 
ble actresses too — who in these interlocutions 
have seemed to set their wits at the jester, and 
to vie conceits with him in downright emula- 
tion. But she used him for her sport, like 
what he was, to trifle a leisure sentence or 
two with, and then to be dismissed, and she 
to be the Great Lady still. She touched the im- 
perious fantastic humour of the character with 
nicety. Her fine spacious person filled the 
scene. 

The part of Malvolio has, in my judgment, 
been so often misunderstood, and the general 
merits of the actor, who then played it, so un- 
duly appreciated, that I shall hope for pardon 
if I am a little prolix upon these points. 

Of all the actors who flourished in my time — 
a melancholy phrase if taken aright, reader — 
Bensley had most of the swell of soul, was 
greatest in the delivery of heroic conceptions, 
the emotions consequent upon the presentment 
of a great idea to the fancy. He had the true 
poetical enthusiasm — the rarest faculty among 
players. None that I remember possessed even 
a portion of that fine madness which he threw 
out in Hotspur's famous, rant about glory, or 
the transports of the Venetian incendiary at 
the vision of the fired city. His voice had the 
dissonance, and at times the inspiriting effect, 
of the trumpet. His gait was uncouth and stiff, 

54 



Essays 



but no way embarrassed by affectation ; and the 
thorough-bred gentleman was uppermost in 
every movement. He seized the moment of 
passion with greatest truth; like a faithful 
clock, never striking before the time ; never an- 
ticipating or leading you to anticipate. He was 
totally destitute of trick and artifice. He seemed 
come upon the stage to do the poet's message 
simply, and he did it with as genuine fidelity as 
the nuncios in Homer deliver the errands of the 
gods. He let the passion or the sentiment do 
its own work without prop or bolstering. He 
would have scorned to mountebank it; and be- 
trayed none of that cleverness which is the bane 
of serious acting. For this reason, his Iago was 
the only endurable one which I remember to 
have seen. No spectator, from his action, could 
divine more of his artifice than Othello was 
supposed to do. His confessions in soliloquy 
alone put you in possession of the mystery. 
There were no by-intimations to make the audi- 
ence fancy their own discernment so much 
greater than that of the Moor — who commonly 
stands like a great helpless mark, set up for 
mine Ancient, and a quantity of barren specta- 
tors, to shoot their bolts at. The Iago of Bens- 
ley did not go to work so grossly. There was 
a triumphant tone about the character, natural 
to a general consciousness of power; but none 
of that petty vanity which chuckles and cannot 
contain itself upon any little successful stroke 
of its knavery — as is common with your small 

55 



Charles Lamb 

villains, and green probationers in mischief. It 
did not clap or crow before its time. It was 
not a man setting his wits at a child, and wink- 
ing all the while at other children, who are 
mightily pleased at being let into the secret; 
but a consummate villain entrapping a noble 
nature into toils, against which no discernment 
was available, where the manner was as fath- 
omless as the purpose seemed dark, and with- 
out motive. The part of Malvolio, in the 
Twelfth Night, was performed by Bensley with 
a richness and a dignity of which (to judge 
from some recent castings of that character) 
the very tradition must be worn out from the 
stage. No manager in those days would have 
dreamed of giving it to Mr. Baddeley or Mr. 
Parsons ; when Bensley was occasionally ab- 
sent from the theatre, John Kemble thought it 
no derogation to succeed to the part. Malvolio 
is not essentially ludicrous. He becomes comic 
but by accident. He is cold, austere, repelling; 
but dignified, consistent, and, for what ap- 
pears, rather of an over-stretched morality. 
Maria describes him as a sort of Puritan; and 
he might have worn his gold chain with honour 
in one of our old round-head families, in the 
service of a Lambert or a Lady Fairfax. But 
his morality and his manners are misplaced in 
Illyria. He is opposed to the proper levities of 
the piece, and falls in the unequal contest. Still 
his pride, or his gravity, (call it which you 
will,) is inherent, and native to the man, not 
56 



Essays 



mock or affected, which latter only are the fit 
objects to excite laughter. His quality is at the 
best unlovely, but neither buffoon nor con- 
temptible. His bearing is lofty, a little above 
his station, but probably not much above his 
deserts. We see no reason why he should not 
have been brave, honourable, accomplished. His 
careless committal of the ring to the ground 
(which he was commissioned to restore to 
Cesario) bespeaks a generosity of birth and 
feeling. His dialect on all occasions is that of 
a gentleman and a man of education. We must 
not confound him with the eternal old, low 
steward of comedy. He is master of the house- 
hold to a great princess ; a dignity probably 
conferred upon him for other respects than age 
or length of service. Olivia, at the first indica- 
tion of his supposed madness, declares that she 
"would not have him miscarry for half of her 
dowry." Does this look as if the character was 
meant to appear little or insignificant? Once, 
indeed, she accuses him to his face — of what? — 
of being "sick of self-love," — but with a gentle- 
ness and considerateness which could not have 
been if she had not thought that this particular 
infirmity shaded some virtues. His rebuke to 
the knight and his sottish revellers is sensible 
and spirited ; and when we take into considera- 
tion the unprotected condition of his mistress, 
and the strict regard with which her state of 
real or dissembled mourning would draw the 
eyes of the world upon her house-affairs, Mal- 

57 



Charles Lamb 

volio might feel the honour of the family in 
some sort in his keeping; as it -appears not 
that Olivia had any more brothers or kinsmen 
to look to it — for Sir Toby had dropped all 
such nice respects at the buttery-hatch. That 
Malvolio was meant to be represented as pos- 
sessing estimable qualities, the expression of 
the Duke, in his anxiety to have him reconciled, 
almost infers: "Pursue him, and entreat him 
to a peace." Even in his abused state of 
chains and darkness, a sort of greatness seems 
never to desert him. He argues highly and well 
with the supposed Sir Topas, and philosophises 
gallantly upon his straw. 1 There must have 
been some shadow of worth about the man ; he 
must have been something more than a mere 
vapour — a thing of straw, or Jack in office — be- 
fore Fabian and Maria could have ventured 
sending him upon a courting errand to Olivia. 
There was some consonancy (as he would say) 
in the undertaking, or the jest would have been 
too bold even for that house of misrule. 

Bensley, accordingly, threw over the part an 
air of Spanish loftiness. He looked, spake, and 
moved like an old Castilian. He was starch, 



1 Clown. What is the opinion of Pythagoras 
concerning wild fowl ? 

Mai That the soul of our grandam might 
haply inhabit a bird. 

Clown. What thinkest thou of his opinion? 
Mai I think nobly of the soul, and no way 
approve his opinion. 

58 



Essays 



spruce, opinionated, but his superstructure of 
pride seemed bottomed upon a sense of worth. 
There was something in it beyond the coxcomb. 
It was big and swelling, but you could not be 
sure that it was hollow. You might wish to 
see it taken down, but you felt that it was upon 
an elevation. He was magnificent from the out- 
set; but when the decent sobrieties of the cha- 
racter began to give way, and the poison of 
self-love, in his conceit of the Countess's affec- 
tion, gradually to work, you would have 
thought that the hero of La Mancha in person 
stood before you. How he went smiling to 
himself ! With what ineffable carelessness 
would he twirl his gold chain ! What a dream 
it was ! You were infected with the illusion, 
and did not wish that it should be removed. 
You had no room for laughter. If an unseason- 
able reflection of morality obtruded itself, it 
was a deep sense of the pitiable infirmity of 
man's nature, that can lay him open to such 
frenzies ; but, in truth, you rather admired than 
pitied the lunacy while it lasted; you felt that 
an hour of such mistake was worth an age with 
the eyes open. Who would not wish to live but 
for a day in the conceit of such a lady's love as 
Olivia? Why, the Duke would have given his 
principality but for a quarter of a minute, 
sleeping or waking, to have been so deluded. 
The man seemed to tread upon air, to taste 
manna, to walk with his head in the clouds, to 
mate Hyperion. O shake not the castles of his 

59 



Charles Lamb 

pride ; endure yet for a season bright moments 
of confidence; "stand still, ye watches of the 
element," that Malvolio may be still in fancy 
fair Olivia's lord ! — but fate and retribution say 
"no." I hear the mischievous titter of Maria — 
the witty taunts of Sir Toby — the still more in- 
supportable triumph of the foolish knight — the 
counterfeit Sir Topas is unmasked — and "thus 
the whirligig of time," as the true clown hath 
it, "brings in his revenges." I confess that I 
never saw the catastrophe of this character, 
while Bensley played it, without a kind of 
tragic interest. There was good foolery too. 
Few now remember Dodd. What an Aguecheek 
the stage lost in him ! Lovegrove, who came 
nearest to the old actors, revived the character 
some few seasons ago, and made it sufficiently 
grotesque ; but Dodd was it, as it came out of 
Nature's hands. It might be said to remain in 
puris naturalibus. In expressing slowness of 
apprehension, this actor surpassed all others. 
You could see the first dawn of an idea stealing 
slowly over his countenance, climbing up by 
little and little, with a painful process, till it 
cleared up at last to the fulness of a twilight 
conception — its highest meridian. He seemed 
to keep back his intellect, as some have had the 
power to retard their pulsation. The balloon 
takes less time in filling than it took to cover 
the expansion of his broad moony face over all 
its quarters with expression. A glimmer of un- 
derstanding would appear in a corner of his 
60 



Essays 



eye, and for lack of fuel go out again. A part 
of his forehead would catch a little intelligence, 
and be a long time in communicating it to the 
remainder. 

I am ill at dates, but I think it is now better 
than five-and-twenty years ago, that walking 
in the gardens of Gray's Inn, — they were then 
far finer than they are now ; the accursed Veru- 
lam Buildings had not encroached upon all the 
east side of them, cutting out delicate green 
crankles, and shouldering away one of two of 
the stately alcoves of the terrace — the survivor 
stands gaping and relationless as if it remem- 
bered its brother — they are still the best gar- 
dens of any of the Inns of Court, my beloved 
Temple not forgotten — have the gravest charac- 
ter : their aspect being altogether reverend and 
law-breathing; Bacon has left the impress of 
his foot upon their gravel walks ; — taking my 
afternoon solace on a Summer day upon the 
aforesaid terrace, a comely sad personage came 
towards me, whom, from his grave air and de- 
portment, I judged to be one of the old Bench- 
ers of the Inn. He had a serious, thoughtful 
forehead, and seemed to be in meditations of 
mortality. As I have an instinctive awe of old 
Benchers, I was passing him with that sort of 
sub-indicative token of respect which one is apt 
to demonstrate towards a venerable stranger, 
and which rather denotes an inclination to 
greet him, than any positive motion of the 
body to that effect, (a species of humility and 
61 



Charles Lamb 

will-worship which I observe, nine times out of 
ten, rather puzzles than pleases the person it is 
offered to,) when the face, turning full upon 
me, strangely identified itself with that of 
Dodd. Upon close inspection I was not mis- 
taken. But could this sad thoughtful counte- 
nance be the same vacant face of folly which I 
had hailed so often under circumstances of 
gaiety ; which I had never seen without a smile, 
or recognised but as the usher of mirth ; that 
looked out so formally flat in Foppington, so 
frothily pert in Tattle, so impotently busy in 
Backbite ; so blankly divested of all meaning, 
or resolutely expressive of none, in Acres, in 
Fribble, and a thousand agreeable imperti- 
nences? Was this the face, full of thought and 
carefulness, that had so often divested itself at 
will of every trace of either to give me di- 
version, to clear my cloudy face for two or 
three hours at least of its furrows? Was this 
the face — manly, sober, intelligent — which I 
had so often despised, made mocks at, made 
merry with? The remembrance of the free- 
doms which I had taken with it came upon me 
with a reproach of insult. I could have asked it 
pardon. I thought it looked upon me with a 
sense of injury. There is something strange as 
well as sad in seeing actors, your pleasant fel- 
lows particularly, subjected to and suffering the 
common lot; their fortunes, their casualties, 
their deaths, seem to belong to the scene, their 
actions to be amenable to poetic justice only. 
62 



Essays 



We can hardly connect them with more awful 
responsibilities. The death of this fine actor took 
place shortly after this meeting. He had quitted 
the stage some months ; and, as I learned after- 
wards, had been in the habit of resorting daily 
to these gardens, almost to the day of his de- 
cease. In these serious walks, probably, he was 
divesting himself of many scenic and some real 
vanities — weaning himself from the frivolities 
of the lesser and the greater theatre — doing 
gentle penance for a life of no very reprehensi- 
ble fooleries — taking off by degrees the buffoon 
mask, which he might feel he had worn too 
long — and rehearsing for a more solemn cast 
of part. Dying, he "put on the weeds of Domi- 
nic." 1 

If few can remember Dodd, many yet living 
will not easily forget the pleasant creature 
who in those days enacted the part of the 



1 Dodd was a man of reading, and left at his 
death a choice collection of old English litera- 
ture. I should judge him to have been a man 
of wit. I know one instance of an impromptu 
which no length of study could have bettered. 
My merry friend, Jem White, had seen Dodd 
one evening in Aguecheek, and recognising him 
the next day in Fleet Street, was irresistibly 
impelled to take off his hat and salute him as 
the identical Knight of the preceding evening 
with a "Save you, Sir Andrew." Dodd, not at 
all disconcerted at this unusual address from a 
stranger, with a courteous half-rebuking wave 
of the hand, put him off with an "Away, 
Fool!" 

63 



Charles Lamb 

Clown to Dodd's Sir Andrew. Richard, or 
rather Dicky Suett — for so in his life-time he 
delighted to be called, and time hath ratified 
the appellation — lieth buried on the north side 
of the cemetery of Holy Paul, to whose serv- 
ice his nonage and tender years were dedi- 
cated. There are who do yet remember him 
at that period — his pipe clear and harmonious. 
He would often speak of his chorister days, 
when he was "cherub Dicky." 

What clipped his wings, or made it expedi- 
ent that he should exchange the holy for the 
profane state; whether he had lost his good 
voice, (his best recommendation to that office,) 
like Sir John, "with hallooing and singing of 
anthems;" or whether he was adjudged to 
lack something, even in those early years, of 
the gravity indispensable to an occupation 
which professeth to "commerce with the skies," 
— I could never rightly learn ; but we find him, 
after the probation of a twelvemonth or so, re- 
verting to a secular condition, and become one 
of us. 

I think he was not altogether of that timber 
out of which cathedral seats and sounding- 
boards are hewed. But if a glad heart — kind, 
and therefore glad — be any part of sanctity, 
then might the robe of motley, with which he 
invested himself with so much humility after 
his deprivation, and which he wore so long 
with so much blameless satisfaction to himself 



64 



Essays 



and to the public, be accepted for a surplice — 
his white stole, and albe. 

The first-fruits of his secularisation was an 
engagement upon the boards of Old Drury, at 
which theatre he commenced, as I have been 
told, with adopting the manner of Parsons in 
old men's characters. At the period in which 
most of us knew him, he was no more an imi- 
tator than he was in any true sense himself 
imitable. 

He was the Robin Goodfellow of the stage. 
He came in to trouble all things with a wel- 
come perplexity, himself no whit troubled for 
the matter. He was known, like Puck, by his 
note — Ha! Ha! Ha! — sometimes deepening 
to Ho! Ho! Ho! with an irresistible acces- 
sion, derived, perhaps, remotely from his ec- 
clesiastical education, foreign to his prototype 
of — La! Thousands of hearts yet respond 
to the chuckling La! of Dicky Suett, 
brought back to their remembrance by the 
faithful transcript of his friend Mathew's mim- 
icry. The "force of nature could no further 
go." He drolled upon the stock of these two 
syllables richer than the cuckoo. 

Care, that troubles all the world, was for- 
gotten in his composition. Had he had but 
two grains (nay, half a grain) of it, he could 
never have supported himself upon those two 
spider's strings, which served him (in the lat- 
ter part of his unmixed existence) as legs. A 
doubt or a scruple must have made him totter, 

65 



Charles Lamb 

a sigh have puffed him down ; the weight of a 
frown had staggered him, a wrinkle made him 
lose his balance. But on he went, scrambling 
upon those airy stilts of his, with Robin Good- 
fellow, "through brake, through briar," reck- 
less of a scratched face or a torn doublet. 

Shakespeare foresaw him, when he framed his 
fools and jesters. They have all the true Suett 
stamp, a loose and shambling gait, a slippery 
tongue, this last the ready midwife to a with- 
out-pain-delivered jest; in words, light as air, 
venting truths deep as the centre; with idlest 
rhymes tagging conceit when busiest, singing 
with Lear in the Tempest, or Sir Toby at the 
buttery-hatch. 

Jack Bannister and he had the fortune to 
be more of personal favourites with the town 
than any actors before or after. The differ- 
ence, I take it, was this: — Jack was more be- 
loved for his sweet, good-natured, moral pre- 
tensions. Dicky was more liked for his sweet, 
good-natured, no pretensions at all. Your 
whole conscience stirred with Bannister's per- 
formance of Walter in the Children in the 
Wood; but Dicky seemed like a thing, as 
Shakspeare says of Love, too young to know 
what conscience is. He put us into Vesta's 
days. Evil fled before him— not as from Jack, 
as from an antagonist, — but because it could 
not touch him, any more than a cannon ball a 
fly. He was delivered from the burthen of 
that death; and, when Death came himself, 
66 



Essays 



not in metaphor, to fetch Dicky, it is recorded 
of him by Robert Palmer, who kindly watched 
his exit, that he received the last stroke, neither 
varying his accustomed tranquillity, nor tune, 
with the simple exclamation, worthy to have 
been recorded in his epitaph — O La! La! 
Bobby! 

The elder Palmer (of stage-treading celeb- 
rity) commonly played Sir Toby in those days ; 
but there is a solidity of wit in the jests of 
that half-Falstaff which he did not quite fill 
out. He was as much too showy as Moody 
(who sometimes took the part) was dry and 
sottish. In sock or buskin there was an air 
of swaggering gentility about Jack Palmer. He 
was a gentleman with a slight infusion of the 
footman. His brother Bob (of recenter mem- 
ory,) who was his shadow in everything while 
he lived, and dwindled into less than a shadow 
afterwards, was a gentleman with a little 
stronger infusion of the latter ingredient; that 
was all. It is amazing how a little of the more 
or less makes a difference in these things. 
When you saw Bobby in the Duke's Servant, 1 
you said "What a pity such a pretty fellow 
was only a servant !" When you saw Jack 
figuring in Captain Absolute, you thought you 
could trace his promotion to some lady of 
quality who fancied the handsome fellow in 
his topknot, and had bought him a commis- 



1 High Life Below Stairs. 
67 



Charles Lamb 

sion. Therefore Jack in Dick Amlet was in- 
superable. 

Jack had two voices, both plausible, hypocrit- 
ical, and insinuating; but his secondary or sup- 
plemental voice still more decisively histrionic 
than his common one. It was reserved for the 
spectator ; and the dramatis personam were 
supposed to know nothing at all about it. The 
lies of Young Wilding, and the sentiments in 
Joseph Surface, were thus marked out in a sort 
of italics to the audience. This secret corre- 
spondence with the company before the curtain 
(which is the bane and death of tragedy) has 
an extremely happy effect in some kinds of 
comedy, in the more highly artificial comedy 
of Congreve or of Sheridan especially, where 
the absolute sense of reality (so indispensable 
to scenes of interest) is not required, or would 
rather interfere to diminish your pleasure. The 
fact is, you do not believe in such characters 
as Surface — the villain of artificial comedy — 
even while you read or see them. If you did, 
they would shock and not divert you. When 

Ben, in Love for Love, returns from sea, the 

< 
following exquisite dialogue occurs at his first 

meeting with his father : — 

Sir Sampson. Thou hast been many a weary 
league, Ben, since I saw thee. 

Ben. Ey, ey, been? Been far enough, and 
that be all. Well, father, and how do all at 
home? How does brother Dick, and brother 
Val? 

Sir Sampson. Dick ! body o' me, Dick has 

68 



Essays 



been dead these two years. I writ you word 
when you were at Leghorn. 

Ben. Mess, that's true : marry, I had for- 
got. Dick is dead, as you say. Well, and 
how, I have a many questions to ask you. 

Here is an instance of insensibility which in 
real life would be revolting, or rather in real 
life could not have co-existed with the warm- 
hearted temperament of the character. But 
when you read it in the spirit with which such 
playful selections and specious combinations 
rather than strict metaphrases of nature should 
be taken, or when you saw Bannister play it, it 
neither did, nor does, wound the moral sense 
at all. For what is Ben — the pleasant sailor 
which Bannister gives us — but a piece of satire 
— a creation of Congreve's fancy — a dreamy 
combination of all the accidents of a sailor's 
character — his contempt of money — his credu- 
lity to women — with that necessary estrange- 
ment from home which it is just within the 
verge of credibility to suppose might produce 
such an hallucination as is here described. We 
never think the worse of Ben for it, or feel it 
as a stain upon his character. But when an 
actor comes, and instead of the delightful phan- 
tom — the creature dear to half-belief, which 
Bannister exhibited — displays before our eyes 
a downright concretion of a Wapping sailor, a 
jolly warm-hearted Jack Tar, and nothing else ; 
when instead of investing it with a delicious 
confusedness of the head, and a veering undi- 
69 



Charles Lamb 

rected goodness of purpose, he gives to it a 
downright daylight understanding, and a full 
consciousness of its actions ; thrusting forward 
the sensibilities of the character with a pre- 
tence as if it stood upon nothing else, and was 
to be judged by them alone — we feel the dis- 
cord of the thing ; the scene is disturbed ; a real 
man has got in among the dramatis personae, 
and puts them out. We want the sailor turned 
out. We feel that his true place is not behind 
the curtain, but in the first or second gallery. 

DETACHED THOUGHTS ON BOOKS 
AND READING 

To mind the inside of a book is to entertain 
one's self with the forced product of another 
man's brain. Now I think a man of quality 
and breeding may be much amused with the 
natural sprouts of his own. — Lord Foppington, 
in the Relapse. 

An ingenious acquaintance of my own was so 
much struck with this bright sally of his Lord- 
ship, that he has left off reading altogether, to 
the great improvement of his originality. At 
the hazard of losing some credit on this head, 
I must confess that I dedicate no inconsidera- 
ble portion of my time to other people's 
thoughts. I dream away my life in others' 
speculations. I love to lose myself in other 
men's minds. When I am not walking I am 
reading; I cannot sit and think. Books think 
for me. 

70 



Essays 



I have no repugnances. Shaftesbury is not 
too genteel for me, nor Jonathan Wild too low. 
I can read anything which I call a book. There 
are things in that shape which I cannot allow 
for such. 

In this catalogue of books which are no 
books — biblia a-biblia, I reckon Court Calen- 
dars, Directories, Pocket Books, Draught 
Boards bound and lettered on the back, Scien- 
tific Treatises, Almanacks, Statutes at Large : 
the works of Hume, Gibbon, Robertson, Beat- 
tie, Soame Jenyns, and generally all those vol- 
umes which "no gentleman's library should be 
without :" the Histories of Flavius Josephus 
(that learned Jew), and Paley's Moral Philoso- 
phy. With these exceptions I can read almost 
anything. I bless my stars for a taste so catho- 
lic, so unexcluding. 

I confess that it moves my spleen to see these 
things in books' clothing perched upon shelves, 
like false saints, usurpers of true shrines, in- 
truders into the sanctuary, thrusting out the 
legitimate occupants. To reach down a well- 
bound semblance of a volume, and hope it some 
kind-hearted play-book, then, opening what 
"seem its leaves," to come bolt upon a wither- 
ing Population Essay. To expect a Steele or a 
Farquhar, and find Adam Smith. To view a 
well-arranged assortment of block-headed En- 
cyclopaedias (Anglicanas or Metropolitanas) 
set out in an array of russia or morocco, when 
a tithe of that good leather would comfortably 

7i 



Charles Lamb 

re-clothe my shivering folios — would renovate 
Paracelsus himself, and enable old Raymund 
Lully to look like himself again in the world. 
I never see these impostors but I long to strip 
them, to warm my ragged veterans in their 
spoils. 

To be strong-backed and neat-bound is the 
desideratum of a volume. Magnificence comes 
after. This, when it can be afforded, is not to 
be lavished upon all kinds of books indiscrimi- 
nately. For instance, I would not dress a set 
of Magazines in full suit. The dishabille, or 
half binding, (with russia backs ever,) is our 
costume. A Shakspeare or a Milton (unless 
the first editions) it were mere foppery to trick 
out in gay apparel. The possession of them 
confers no distinction. The exterior of them, 
(the things themselves being so common), 
strange to say, raises no sweet emotions, no 
tickling sense of property in the owner. Thom- 
son's Seasons, again, looks best (I maintain it) 
a little torn and dog's-eared. How beautiful 
to a genuine lover of reading are the sullied 
leaves and worn-out appearance, nay, the very 
odour, (beyond russia,) if we would not for- 
get kind feelings in fastidiousness, of an old 
''Circulating Library" Tom Jones, or Vicar of 
Wakefield ! How they speak of the thousand 
thumbs that have turned over their pages with 
delight ! of the lone sempstress, whom they 
may have cheered (milliner, or harder- work- 
ing mantuamaker) after her long day's needle- 
72 



Essays 



toil, running far into midnight, when she has 
snatched an hour, ill spared from sleep, to 
steep her cares, as in some Lethean cup, in 
spelling out their enchanting contents ! Who 
would have them a whit less soiled? What 
better condition could we desire to see them in? 
In some respects the better a book is, the 
less it demands from binding. Fielding, Smol- 
lett, Sterne, and all that class of perpetually 
self-reproductive volumes — Great Nature's 
Stereotypes — we see them individually perish 
with less regret, because we know the copies 
of them to be "eterne." But where a book is 
at once both good and rare, where the individ- 
ual is almost the species, and when that per- 
ishes, 

We know not where is that Promethean torch 
That can its light relumine; 

such a book, for instance, as the Life of the 
Duke of Newcastle, by his Duchess : no casket 
is rich enough, no casing sufficiently durable, 
to honour and keep safe such a jewel. 

Not only rare volumes of this description, 
which seem hopeless ever to be reprinted, but 
old editions of writers, such as Sir Philip Syd- 
ney, Bishop Taylor, Milton in his prose works, 
Fuller, (of whom we have reprints, yet the 
books themselves, though they go about, and 
are talked of here and there, we know have not 
endenizened themselves, nor possibly ever will, 
in the national heart, so as to become stock 

73 



Charles Lamb 

books,) it is good to possess these in durable 
and costly covers. I do not care for a First 
Folio of Shakspeare. I rather prefer the com- 
mon editions of Rowe and Tonson, without 
notes, and with plates, which, being so execra- 
bly bad, serve as maps or modest remem- 
brancers to the text; and without pretending 
to any supposable emulation with it, are so 
much better than the Shakespeare engravings, 
which did. I have a community of feeling with 
my countryman about his Plays, and I like 
those editions of him best which have been 
oftenest tumbled about and handled. On the 
contrary, I cannot read Beaumont and Fletcher 
but in Folio. The Octavo editions are painful 
to look at. I have no sympathy with them. If 
they were as much read as the current editions 
of the other poet, I should prefer them in that 
shape to the older one. I do not know a more 
heartless sight than the reprint of the "Anat- 
omy of Melancholy." What need was there of 
unearthing the bones of that fantastic old great 
man, to expose them in a winding-sheet of 
the newest fashion to modern censure? What 
hapless stationer could dream of Burton ever 
becoming popular? The wretched Malone 
could not do worse, when he bribed the sex- 
ton of Stratford Church to let him white-wash 
the painted effigy of old Shakspeare, which 
stood there, in rude but lively fashion depicted, 
to the very colour of the cheek, the eye, the 
eyebrow, hair, the very dress he used to wear, 

74 



Essays 



— the only authentic testimony we had, how- 
ever imperfect, of these curious parts and par- 
cels of him. They covered him over with a 

coat of white paint. By , if I had been a 

justice of peace for Warwickshire, I would 
have clapped both commentator and sexton 
fast in the stocks, for a pair of meddling sac- 
rilegious varlets. 

I think I see them at their work, these sapient 
trouble-tombs ! 

Shall I be thought fantastical if I confess 
that the names of some of our poets sound 
sweeter, and have a finer relish to the ear, (to 
mine at least,) than that of Milton or of Shaks- 
peare? It may be that the latter are more 
staled and rung upon in common discourse. 
The sweetest names, and which carry a per- 
fume in the mention, are Kit Marlowe, Dray- 
ton, Drummond of Hawthornden, and Cowley. 

Much depends upon when and where you 
read a book. In the five or six impatient min- 
utes before the dinner is quite ready, who 
would think of taking up the "Fairy Queen" 
for a stop-gap, or a volume of Bishop An- 
drewes's sermons? 

Milton almost requires a solemn service of 
music to be played before you enter upon him. 
But he brings his music ; to which, who listens, 
had need bring docile thoughts and purged 
ears. 

Winter evenings — the world shut out — with 
less of ceremony the gentle Shakspeare enters. 
75 



Charles Lamb 

At such a season the Tempest, or his own 
Winter's Tale. 

These two poets you cannot avoid reading 
aloud — to yourself, or (as it chances) to some 
single person listening. More than one, and it 
degenerates into an audience. 

Books of quick interest, that hurry on for 
incidents, are for the eye to glide over only. 
It will not do to read them out. I could never 
listen to even the better kind of modern novels 
without extreme irksomeness. 

A newspaper read out is intolerable. In some 
of the Bank offices it is the custom (to save so 
much individual time) for one of the clerks, 
who is the best scholar, to commence upon the 
Times, or the Chronicle, and recite its entire 
contents aloud, pro bono publico. With every 
advantage of lungs and elocution, the effect is 
singularlv vapid. In barbers' shops and public- 
houses a fellow will get up and spell out a para- 
graph, which he communicates as some dis- 
covery. Another follows with his selection. So 
the entire journal transpires at length by piece- 
meal. Seldom-readers are slow readers, and 
without this expedient no one in the company 
would probably ever travel through the con- 
tents of a whole paper. 

Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one 
ever lays one down without a feeling of dis- 
appointment. 

What an eternal time that gentleman in black, 
at Nando's, keeps the paper! I am sick of 
76 



Essays 

hearing the waiter bawling out incessantly, 
"The Chronicle is in hand, Sir." 

Coming into an inn at night— having ordered 
your supper — what can be more delightful than 
to find lying in the window-seat, left there time 
out of mind by the carelessness of some former 
guest, two or three numbers of the old Town 
and Country Magazine, with its amusing tete- 
a-tete pictures— "The Royal Lover and Lady 

G ;" "The Melting Platonic and the old 

Beau," — and such-like antiquated scandal? 
Would you exchange it — at that time, and in 
that place — for a better book? 

Poor Tobin, who latterly fell blind, did not 
regret it so much for the weightier kinds of 
reading, (the "Paradise Lost," or "Comus," he 
could have read to him,) but he missed the 
pleasure of skimming over with his own eye a 
magazine, or a light pamphlet. 

I should not care to be caught in the serious 
avenues of some cathedral alone, and reading 
Candide. 

I do not remember a more whimsical sur- 
prise than having been once detected, by a 
familiar damsel, reclined at my ease upon the 
grass, on Primrose Hill, (her Cythera,) read- 
ing Pamela. There was nothing in the book 
to make a man seriously ashamed at the ex- 
posure; but as she seated herself down by me, 
and seemed determined to read in company, I 
could have wished it had been any other book. 
We read on very sociably for a few pages ; but 

77 



Charles Lamb 

not finding the author much to her taste she got 
up and went away. Gentle casuist, I leave it 
to thee to conjecture, whether the blush (for 
there was one between us) was the property of 
the nymph or the swain in this dilemma. From 
me you shall never get the secret. 

I am not much a friend to out-of-doors read- 
ing. I cannot settle my spirits to it. I knew 
a Unitarian minister, who was generally to be 
seen upon Snow Hill, (as yet Skinner's Street 
was not,) between the hours of ten and eleven 
in the morning, studying a volume of Lardner. 
I own this to have been a strain of abstraction 
beyond my reach. I used to admire how he 
sidled along, keeping clear of secular contacts. 
An illiterate encounter with a porter's knot or 
a bread-basket would have quickly put to flight 
all the theology I am master of, and have left 
nu worse than indifferent to the five points. 

There is a class of street readers whom I can 
never contemplate without affection, — the poor 
gentry, who, not having wherewithal to buy or 
hire a book, filch a little learning at the open 
stalls : the owner, with his hard eye, casting 
envious looks at them all the while, and think- 
ing when they will have done. Venturing ten- 
derly, page after page, expecting every moment 
when he shall interpose his interdict, and yet 
unable to deny themselves the gratification, 

they "snatch a fearful joy." Martin B , in 

this way. by daily fragments, got through two 

volumes of "Clarissa," when the stall-keeper 

7S 



Essays 



damped his laudable ambition, by asking him 
(it was in his younger days) whether he meant 
to purchase the work. M declares, that un- 
der no circumstance in his life did he ever pe- 
ruse a book with half the satisfaction which he 
took in those uneasy snatches. A quaint poetess 
of our day has moralised upon this subject in 
two very touching but homely stanzas : — 

"I saw a boy with eager eye 
Open a book upon a stall, 
And read, as he'd devour it all ; 
Which when the stall-man did espy, 
Soon to the boy I heard him call, 
'You Sir, you never buy a book, 
Therefore in one you shall not look.' 
The boy pass'd slowly on, and with a sigh 
He wish'd he never had been taught to read, 
Then of the old churl's books he should have 
had no need. 

Of sufferings the poor have many, 

Which never can the rich annoy : 

I soon perceived another boy, 

Who look'd as if he had not any 

Food — for that day at least — enjoy 

The sight of cold meat in a tavern larder. 

This boy's case, then thought I, is surely 

harder, 
Thus hungry, longing, thus without a penny, 
Beholding choice of dainty-dressed meat : 
No wonder if he wish he ne'er had learn'd to 

eat." 



79 



Charles Lamb 



THE SUPERANNUATED MAN 

Sera tamen respexit. 
Libertas. Virgil. 

A Clerk I was in London gay. — O'Keefe. 

If peradventure, Reader, it has been thy lot 
to waste the golden years of thy life, thy shin- 
ing youth, in the irksome confinement of an 
office ; to have thy prison days prolonged 
through middle age down to decrepitude and 
silver hairs, without hope of release or respite ; 
to have lived to forget that there are such 
things as holidays, or to remember them but 
as the prerogatives of childhood; then, and 
then only, will you be able to appreciate my 
deliverance. 

It is now six-and-thirty years since I took 
my seat at the desk in Mincing Lane. Melan- 
choly was the transition at fourteen from the 
abundant playtime, and the frequently inter- 
vening vacations of school days, to the eight, 
nine, and sometimes ten hours a-day attend- 
ance at the counting-house. But time partially 
reconciles us to anything. I gradually became 
content; doggedly contented, as wild animals 
in cages. 

It is true I had my Sundays to myself; but 
Sundays, admirable as the institution of them 
is for purposes of worship, are for that very 
reason the very worst adapted for days of un- 
bending and recreation. In particular, there is 
80 



Essays 

a gloom for me attendant upon a City Sunday, 
a weight in the air. I miss the cheerful cries of 
London, the music, and the ballad-singers, the 
buzz and stirring murmur of the streets. Those 
eternal bells depress me. The closed shops re- 
pel me. Prints, pictures, all the glittering and 
endless succession of knacks and gew-gaws, 
and ostentatiously displayed wares of trades- 
men, which make a week-day saunter through 
the less busy parts of the metropolis so de- 
lightful, are shut out. No book-stalls deli- 
ciously to idle over; no busy faces to recreate 
the idle man who contemplates them ever pass- 
ing by; the very face of business a charm by 
contrast to his temporary relaxation from it. 
Nothing to be seen but unhappy countenances 
— or half-happy at best — of emancipated 'pren- 
tices and little tradesfolk, with here and there 
a servant-maid that has got leave to go out, 
who, slaving all the week, with the habit has 
lost almost the capacity of enjoying a free 
hour, and livelily expressing the hollowness of 
a day's pleasuring. The very strollers in the 
fields on that day look anything but comfort- 
able. 

But besides Sundays, I had a day at Easter 
and a day at Christmas, with a full week in the 
Summer to go and air myself in my native 
fields of Hertfordshire. This last was a great 
indulgence ; and the prospect of its recurrence, 
I believe, alone kept me up through the year, 
and made my durance tolerable. But when the 
81 



Charles Lamb 

week came round, did the glittering phantom 
of the distance keep touch with me? or rather 
was it not a series of seven uneasy days, spent 
in restless pursuit of pleasure, and a wearisome 
anxiety to find out how to make the most of 
them? Where was the quiet? where the prom- 
ised rest? Before I had a taste of it, it was 
vanished. I was at the desk again, counting 
upon the fifty-one tedious weeks that must in- 
tervene before such another snatch would come. 
Still the prospect of its coming threw some- 
thing of an illumination upon the darker side 
of my captivity. Without it, as I have said, I 
could scarcely have sustained my thraldom. 

Independently of the rigours of attendance, I 
have ever been haunted with a sense (perhaps 
a mere caprice) of incapacity for business. 
This, during my latter years, had increased to 
such a degree that it was visible in all the lines 
of my countenance. My health and my good 
spirits flagged. I had perpetually a dread of 
some crisis, to which I should be found un- 
equal. Besides my daylight servitude, I served 
over again all night in my sleep, and would 
awake with terrors of imaginary false entries, 
errors in my accounts, and the like. I was fifty 
years of age, and no prospect of emancipation 
presented itself. I had grown to my desk, as it 
were ; and the wood had entered into my soul. 

My fellows in the office would sometimes 
rally me upon the trouble legible in my coun- 
tenance ; but I did not know that it had raised 
82 



Essayj 



the suspicions of any of my employers, when, 
on the fifth of last month, a day ever to be re- 
membered by me, L , the junior partner in 

the firm, calling me on one side, directly taxed 
me with my bad looks, and frankly inquired 
the cause of them. So taxed, I honestly made 
confession of my infirmity, and added that I 
was afraid I should eventually be obliged to 
resign his service. He spoke some words of 
course to hearten me, and there the matter 
rested. A whole week I remained labouring 
under the impression that I had acted impru- 
dently in my disclosure ; that I had foolishly 
given a handle against myself, and had been 
anticipating my own dismissal. A week passed 
in this manner, the most anxious one, I verily 
believe, in my whole life, when on the evening 
of the 12th of April, just as I was about quit- 
ting my desk to go home, (it might be about 
eight o'clock,) I received an awful summons to 
attend the presence of the whole assembled 
firm in the formidable back parlour. I thought 
now my time was surely come. I have done for 
myself. I am going to be told that they have 

no longer occasion for me. L , I could see, 

smiled at the terror I was in, which was a lit- 
tle relief to me, — when to my utter astonish- 
ment B , the eldest partner, began a formal 

harangue to me on the length of my services, 
my very meritorious conduct during the whole 
of the time, (the deuce, thought I, how did he 
find out that? I protest I never had the con- 

83 



Charles Lamb 

fidence to think as much). He went on to 
descant on the expediency of retiring at a cer- 
tain time of life, (how my heart panted!) and 
asking me a few questions as to the amount 
of my own property, of which I have a little, 
ended with a proposal, to which his three part- 
ners nodded a grave assent, that I should ac- 
cept from the house, which I had served so 
well, a pension for life to the amount of two- 
thirds of my accustomed salary, — a magnificent 
offer ! I do not know what I answered be- 
tween surprise and gratitude, but it was under- 
stood that I accepted their proposal, and I was 
told that I was free from that hour to leave 
their service. I stammered out a bow, and at 
just ten minutes after eight I went home — for- 
ever. This noble benefit (gratitude forbids me 
to conceal their names) I owe to the kindness 
of the most munificent firm in the world, — the 
house of Boldero, Merryweather, Bosanquet, 
and Lacy. 

Esto perpetual 

For the first day or two I felt stunned, over- 
whelmed. I could only apprehend my felicity; 
I was too confused to taste it sincerely. I 
wandered about, thinking I was happy, and 
knowing that I was not. I was in the condi- 
tion of a prisoner in the old Bastile, suddenly 
let loose after a forty years' confinement. I 
could scarce trust myself with myself. It was 
like passing out of Time into Eternity, for it is 



Essays 



a sort of Eternity for a man to have his Time 
all to himself. It seemed to me that I had 
more time on my hands than I could ever 
manage. From a poor man, poor in Time, I 
was suddenly lifted up into a vast revenue; I 
could see no end of my possessions : I wanted 
some steward, or judicious bailiff, to manage 
my estates in Time for me. And here let me 
caution persons grown old in active business, 
not lightly, nor without weighing their own re- 
sources, to forego their customary employment 
all at once, for there may be danger in it. I 
feel it by myself, but I know that my resources 
are sufficient; and now that those first giddy 
raptures have subsided, I have a quiet home 
feeling of the blessedness of my condition. I 
am in no hurry. Having all holidays, I am as 
though I had none. If Time hung heavy upon 
me, I could walk it away; but I do not walk 
all day long, as I used to do in those transient 
holidays, thirty miles a day, to make the most 
of them. If Time were troublesome, I could 
read it away; but I do not read in that violent 
measure, with which, having no Time my own 
but candlelight Time, I used to weary out my 
head and eyesight in by-gone Winters. I walk, 
read, or scribble, (as now,) just when the fit 
seizes me. I no longer hunt after pleasure; I 
let it come to me. I am like the man 

-that's born, and has his years come to 



him, 
In some green desert. 

85 



Charles Lamb 

"Years!" you will say; what is that super- 
annuated simpleton calculating upon? He has 
already told us he is past fifty." 

I have indeed lived nominally fifty years ; but 
deduct out of them the hours which I have 
lived to other people, and not to myself, and 
you will find me still a young fellow : for that 
is the only true Time which a man can prop- 
erly call his own, that which he has all to him- 
self ; the rest, though in some sense he may 
be said to live it, is other people's Time, not 
his. The remnant of my poor days, long or 
short, is at least multiplied for me threefold. 
My ten next years, if I stretch so far, will be as 
long as any preceding thirty. 'Tis a fair Rule- 
of-Three sum. 

Among the strange fantasies which beset me 
at the commencement of my freedom, and of 
which all traces are not yet gone, one was, 
that a vast tract of time that intervened since 
I quitted the Counting House. I could not 
conceive of it as an affair of yesterday. The 
partners and the clerks, with whom I had for 
so many years and for so many hours in each 
day of the year been closely associated, being 
suddenly removed from them, they seemed as 
dead to me. There is a fine passage, which 
may serve to illustrate this fancy, in a Tragedy 
by Sir Robert Howard, speaking of a friend's 
death : — 

-'Twas but just now he went away; 



I have not since had time to shed a tear 
86 



Essays 



And yet the distance does the same appear 
As if he had been a thousand years from me ! 
Time takes no measure in Eternity. 

To dissipate this awkward feeling, I have 
been fain to go among them once or twice 
since; to visit my old desk- fellows — my co- 
brethren of the quill — that I had left below in 
the state militant. Not all the kindness with 
which they received me could quite restore to 
me that pleasant familiarity which I had 
hitherto enjoyed among them. We cracked 
some of our old jokes, but methought they 
went off but faintly. My old desk, the peg 
where I hung my hat, were appropriated to an- 
other. I knew it must be, but I could not take 

it kindly. D 1 take me, if I did not feel 

some remorse — beast, if I had not — at quitting 
my old compeers, the faithful partners of my 
toils for six-and-thirty years, that smoothed 
for me with their jokes and conundrums the 
ruggedness of my professional road. Had it 
been so rugged then, after all? or was I sim- 
ply a coward? Well, it is too late to repent; and 
Ialsoknowthat these suggestions are a common 
fallacy of the mind on such occasions. But my 
heart smote me. I had violently broken the 
bands betwixt us. It was at least not courteous. 
I shall be some time before I get quite recon- 
ciled to the separation. Farewell, old cronies ; 
yet not for long, for again and again I will 
come among ye, if I shall have your leave. 
Farewell, Ch , dry, sarcastic, and friendly! 

87 



Charles Lamb 

Do , mild, slow to move, and gentlemanly ! 

PI , officious to do and to volunteer good 

services ! — and thou, thou dreary pile, fit man- 
sion for a Gresham or a Whittington of old, 
stately house of Merchants; with thy labyrin- 
thine passages, and light-excluding, pent-up of- 
fices, where candles for one-half the year sup- 
plied the place of the sun's light; unhealthy 
contributor to my weal, stern fosterer of my 
living, farewell ! In thee remain, and not in 
the obscure collection of some wandering book- 
seller, my "works!" There let them rest, as 
I do from my labours, piled on thy massy 
shelves, more MSS. in folio than ever Aquinas 
left, and full as useful ! My mantle I be- 
queathe among ye. 

A fortnight has passed since the date of my 
first communication. At that period I was ap- 
proaching to tranquillity, but had not reached 
it. I boasted of a calm indeed, but it was com- 
parative only. Something of the first flutter 
was left; an unsettling sense of novelty; the 
dazzle to weak eyes of unaccustomed light. I 
missed my old chains, forsooth, as if they had 
been some necessary part of my apparel. I 
was a poor Carthusian, from strict cellular dis- 
cipline suddenly by some revolution returned 
upon the world. I am now as if I had never 
been other than my own master. It is natural 
to me to go where I please, to do what I please. 
I find myself at eleven o'clock in the day in 
Bond Street, and it seems to me that I have 
88 



Essays 



been sauntering there at that very hour for 
years past. I digress into Soho, to explore a 
bookstall. Methinks I have been thirty years a 
collector. There is nothing strange nor new 
in it. • I find myself before a fine picture in the 
morning. Was it ever otherwise? What is 
become of Fish Street Hill ? Where is Fen- 
church Street? Stones of old Mincing Lane, 
which I have worn with my daily pilgrimage 
for six-and-thirty years, to the footsteps of 
what toil-worn clerk are your everlasting flints 
now vocal ? I indent the gayer flags of Pall 
Mall. It is 'Change time, and I am strangely 
among the Elgin marbles. It was no hyperbole- 
when I ventured to compare the change in my 
condition to a passing into another world. 
Time stands still in a manner to me. I have 
lost all distinction of season. I do not know 
the day of the week or of the month. Each day 
used to be individually felt by me in its refer- 
ence to the foreign post days ; in its distance 
from, or propinquity to, the next Sunday. I 
had my Wednesday feelings, my Saturday 
nights' sensations. The genius of each day was 
upon me distinctly during the whole of it, af- 
fecting my appetite, spirits, &c. The phantom 
of the next day, with the dreary five to follow, 
sate as a load upon my poor Sabbath recrea- 
tions. What charm has washed that Ethiop 
white? What is gone of Black Monday? All 
days are the same. Sunday itself — that un- 
fortunate failure of a holiday, as it too often 



Charles Lamb 

proved, what with my sense of its fugitiveness, 
and over-care to get the greatest quantity of 
pleasure out of it — is melted down into a week- 
day. I can spare time to go to church now, 
without grudging the huge cantle which it 
used to seem to cut out of the holiday. I have 
time for everything. I can visit a sick friend. 
I can interrupt the man of much occupation 
when he is busiest. I can insult over him 
with an invitation to take a day's pleasure with 
me to Windsor this fine May morning. It is 
Lucretian pleasure to behold the poor drudges, 
whom I have left behind in the world, carking 
and caring; like horses in a mill, drudging on 
in the same eternal round : and what is it all 
for? A man can never have too much Time 
to himself, nor too little to do. Had I a little 
son, I would christen him Nothing-to-do ; he 
should do nothing. Man, I verily believe, is 
out of his element as long as he is operative. 
I am altogether for the life contemplative. Will 
no kindly earthquake come and swallow up 
those accursed cotton mills? Take me that 
lumber of a desk there, and bowl it down 

As low as to the fiends. 

I am no longer* *****, clerk to the Firm 
of, &c. I am Retired Leisure. I am to be met 
with in trim gardens. I am already come to be 
known by my vacant face and careless gesture, 
perambulating at no fixed place, nor with any 
settled purpose. I walk about; not to and 
90 



Essays 



from. They tell me, a certain cum dignitate 
air, that has been buried so long with my other 
good parts, has begun to shoot forth in my per- 
son. I perceptibly grow into gentility. When 
I take up a newspaper, it is to read the state 
of the opera. Opus operatum est. I have done 
all that I came into this world to do. I have 
worked task-work, and have the rest of the 
day to myself. 

OLD CHINA 

I have an almost feminine partiality for old 
china. When I go to see any great house I 
inquire for the china closet, and next for the 
picture gallery. I cannot defend the order of 
preference but by saying that we have all some 
taste or other, of too ancient a date to admit 
of our remembering distinctly that it was an 
acquired one. I can call to mind the first play 
and the first exhibition that I was taken to ; but 
I am not conscious of a time when china jars 
and saucers were introduced into my imagina- 
tion. 

I had no repugnance then (why should I now 
have?) to those little, lawless, azure-tinctured 
grotesques, that under the notion of men and 
women float about, uncircumscribed by any ele- 
ment, in that world before perspective — a china 
tea-cup. 

I like to see my old friends — whom distance 
cannot diminish — figuring up in the air (so 

9i 



Charles Lamb 

they appear to our optics), yet on terra Hrrna 
still, for so we must in courtesy interpret that 
speck of deeper blue which the decorous ar- 
tist, to prevent absurdity, had made to spring 
up beneath their sandals. 

I love the men with women's faces, and the 
women, if possible, with still more womanish 
expressions. 

Here is a young and courtly Mandarin, hand- 
ing tea to a lady from a salver, two miles off. 
See how distance seems to set off respect ! And 
here the same lady, or another, (for likeness 
is identity on teacups,) is stepping into a little 
fairy boat, moored on the hither side of this 
calm garden river, with a dainty mincing foot, 
which in a right angle of incidence (as angles 
go in our world) must infallibly land her in 
the midst of a flowery mead a furlong off on 
the other side of the same strange stream ! 

Farther on — if far or near can be predicated 
of their world — see horses, trees, pagodas, 
dancing the hays. 

Here a cow and rabbit couchant and co-ex- 
tensive ; so objects show, seen through the 
lucid atmosphere of fine Cathay. 

I was pointing out to my cousin last evening, 
over our Hyson, (which we are old-fashioned 
enough to drink unmixed still of an afternoon,) 
some of these speciosa miracula upon a set of 
extraordinary old blue china (a recent pur- 
chase) which we were now for the first time 
using; and could not help remarking how fa- 
92 



Essays 



vourable circumstances had been to us of late 
years, that we could afford to please the eye 
sometimes with trifles of this sort, when a pass- 
ing sentiment seemed to overshade the brows of 
my companion. I am quick at detecting these 
Summer clouds in Bridget. 

"I wish the good old times would come 
again," she said, "when we were not quite so 
rich. I do not mean that I want to be poor; 
but there was a middle state," (so she was 
pleased to ramble on,) "in which I am sure we 
were a great deal happier. A purchase is but 
a purchase, now that you have money enough 
and to spare. Formerly it used to be a triumph. 
When we coveted a cheap luxury (and Oh, 
how much ado I had to get you to consent in 
those times!) — we were used to have a debate 
two or three days before, and to weigh the for 
and against, and think what we might spare it 
out of, and what saving we could hit upon, 
that should be an equivalent. A thing was 
worth buying then, when we felt the money 
tnat we paid for it. 

"Do you remember the brown suit, which 
you made to hang upon you till all your friends 
cried shame upon you, it grew so thread-bare, 
and all because of that folio Beaumont and 
Fletcher, which you dragged home late at 
night from Barker's, in Covent Garden? Do 
you remember how we eyed it for weeks be- 
fore we could make up our minds to the pur- 
chase, and had not come to a determination till 
93 



Charles Lamb 

it was near ten o'clock of the Saturday night, 
when you set off from Islington, fearing you 
should be too late, — and when the old book- 
seller with some grumbling opened his shop, 
and by the twinkling taper (for he was setting 
bedwards) lighted out the relic from his dusty 
treasures, — and when you lugged it home, 
wishing it were twice as cumbersome, — and 
when you presented it to me, — and when we 
were exploring the perfectness of it (collating 
you called it), — and while I was repairing some 
of the loose leaves with paste, which your im- 
patience would not suffer to be left till day- 
break, — was there no pleasure in being a poor 
man? Or can those neat black clothes which 
you wear now, and are so careful to keep 
brushed, since we have become rich and finical, 
give you half the honest vanity with which you 
flaunted it about in that overworn suit — your 
old corbeau — for four or five weeks longer than 
you should have done, to pacify your conscience 
for the mighty sum of fifteen shillings — or six- 
teen was it? (a great affair we thought it then) 
which you had lavished on the old folio. Now 
you can afford to buy any book that pleases 
you, but I do not see that you ever bring me 
home any nice old purchases now. 

"When vou came home with twenty apologies 
for laying out a less number of shillings upon 
that print after Lionardo, which we christened 
the 'Lady Blanch ;' when you looked at the pur- 
chase, and thought of the money — and looked 

94 



Essays 

again at the picture, and thought of the money 
— was there no pleasure in being a poor man? 
Now you have nothing to do but to walk into 
Colnaghi's, and buy a wilderness of Lionardos. 
Yet do you? 

"Then do you remember our pleasant walks 
to Enfield, and Potter's Bar, and Waltham, 
when we had a holyday, (holydays and all 
other fun are gone now we are rich,) and the 
little hand-basket in which I used to deposit 
our day's fare of savoury cold lamb and salad 
— and how you would pry about at noontide 
for some decent house, where we might go in 
and produce our store, only paying for the ale 
that you must call for, and speculate upon the 
looks of the landlady, and whether she was 
likely to allow us a table-cloth, — and wish for 
such another honest hostess as Izaak Walton 
has described many a one on the pleasant banks 
of the Lea, when he went a fishing ; and some- 
times they would prove obliging enough, and 
sometimes they would look grudgingly upon 
us ; but we had cheerful looks still for one an- 
other, and would eat our plain food savourily, 
scarcely grudging Piscator his Trout Hall. 
Now, when we go out a day's pleasuring, which 
is seldom moreover, we ride part of the way, 
and go into a fine inn, and order the best of 
dinners, never debating the expense, which, 
after all, never has half the relish of those 
chance country snaps, when we were at the 



95 



Charles Lamb 

mercy of uncertain usage and a precarious wel- 
come. 

"You are too proud to see a play anywhere 
now but in the pit. Do you remember where 
it was we used to sit, when we saw the Battle 
of Hexham, and the Surrender of Calais, and 
Bannister and Mrs. Bland in the Children in 
the Wood, — when we squeezed out our shill- 
ings a-piece to sit three or four times in a sea- 
son in the one-shilling gallery, where you felt 
all the time that you ought not to have brought 
me, and more strongly I felt obligation to you 
for having brought me, — and the pleasure was 
the better for a little shame, — and when the 
curtain drew up, what cared we for our place 
in the house, or what mattered it where we were 
sitting, when our thoughts were with Rosalind 
in Arden, or with Viola at the Court of Illyria? 
You used to say that the gallery was the best 
place of all for enjoying a play socially; that 
the relish of such exhibitions must be in pro- 
portion to the infrequency of going; that the 
company we met there, not being in general 
readers of plays, were obliged to attend the 
more, and did attend, to what was going on on 
the stage, because a word lost would have been 
a chasm, which it was impossible for them to 
fill up. With such "reflections we consoled our 
pride then; and I appeal to you whether, as a 
woman, I met generally with less attention and 
accommodation than I have done since in more 
expensive situations in the house? Getting in 
96 



Essays 



indeed, and crowding up those inconvenient 
staircases, was bad enough; but there was still 
a law of civility to woman recognised to quite 
as great an extent as we ever found in the 
other passages; and how a little difficulty over- 
come heightened the snug seat and the play, 
afterwards ! Now we can only pay our money 
and walk in. You cannot see, you say, in the 
galleries now. I am sure we saw, and heard 
too, well enough then; but sight and all, I 
think, is gone with our poverty. 

"There was pleasure in eating strawberries 
before they became quite common ; in the first 
dish of pease while they were yet dear ; to have 
them for a nice supper, a treat. What treat 
can we have now? If we were to treat our- 
selves now — that is, to have dainties a little 
above our means, it would be selfish and 
wicked. It is the very little more that we al- 
low ourselves beyond what the actual poor can 
get at, that makes what I call a treat — when 
two people living together, as we have done, 
now and then indulge themselves in a cheap 
luxury, which both like; while each apologizes, 
and is willing to take both halves of the blame 
to his single share. I see no harm in people 
making much of themselves, in that sense of 
the word. It may give them a hint how to 
make much of others. But now, what I mean 
by the word — we never do make much of 
ourselves. None but the poor can do it. I do 



97 



Charles Lamb 

not mean the veriest poor of all, but persons as 
we were, just above poverty. 

"I know what you were going to say, that it 
is mighty pleasant at the end of the year to 
make all meet ; and much ado we used to have 
every Thirty-first Night of December to ac- 
count for our exceedings ; many a long face did 
you make over your puzzled accounts, and in 
contriving to make it out how we had spent so 
much, or that we had not spent so much, or 
that it was impossible we should spend so much 
next year ; and still we found our slender capi- 
tal decreasing; but then, — betwixt ways, and 
projects, and compromises of one sort or an- 
other, and talk of curtailing this charge, and 
doing without that for the future, and the hope 
that youth brings, and laughing spirits, (in 
which you were never poor till now,) we pock- 
eted up our loss, and in conclusion, with 'lusty 
brimmers,' (as you used to quote it out of 
hearty cheerful Mr. Cotton, as you called him,) 
we used to welcome in 'the coming guest.' 
Now we have no reckoning at all at the end of 
the Old Year, — no flattering promises about the 
New Year doing better for us." 

Bridget is so sparing of her speech on most 
occasions, that when she gets into a rhetorical 
vein I am careful how I interrupt it. I could 
not help, however, smiling at the phantom of 
wealth which her dear imagination had con- 
jured up out of a clear income of poor hun- 
dred pounds a year. "It is true we were hap- 
98 



Essays 

pier when we were poorer, but we were also 
younger, my cousin. I am afraid we must put 
up with the excess, for if we were to shake the 
superflux into the sea we should not much 
mend ourselves. That we had much to strug- 
gle with, as we grew up together, we have rea- 
son to be most thankful. It strengthened and 
knit our compact closer. We could never have 
been what we have been to each other if we 
had always had the sufficiency which you now 
complain of. The resisting power — those nat- 
ural dilations of the youthful spirit which cir- 
cumstances cannot straiten — with us are long 
since passed away. Competence to age is sup- 
plementary youth; a sorry supplement indeed, 
but I fear the best that is to be had. We must 
ride where we formerly walked ; live better and 
lie softer — and shall be wise to do so — than we 
had means to do in those good old days you 
speak of. Yet could those days return; could 
you and I once more walk our thirty miles a 
day; could Bannister and Mrs. Bland again be 
young, and you and I be young to see them; 
could the good old one-shilling gallery days re- 
turn, (they are dreams, my cousin, now), but 
could you and I at this moment, instead of 
this quiet argument, by our well-carpeted fire- 
side, sitting on this luxurious sofa, be once 
more struggling up those inconvenient stair- 
cases, pushed about, and squeezed, and elbowed 
by the poorest rabble of poor gallery scram- 
blers; could I once more hear those anxious 
99 



Charles Lamb 

shrieks of yours, and the delicious Thank God, 
we are safe, which always followed when the 
topmost stair, conquered, let in the first light 
of the whole cheerful theatre down beneath us, 
I know not the fathom-line that ever touched 
a descent so deep as I would be willing to bury 
more wealth in than Crcesus had, or the great 

Jew R is supposed to have, to purchase it. 

And now do just look at that merry little Chi- 
nese waiter holding an umbrella, big enough 
for a bed-tester, over the head of that pretty 
insipid half Madona-ish chit of a lady in that 
very blue summer-house." 



IOO 



Letters 



LETTERS 



"****** Letters of dear Charles 
Lamb, 'Saint Charles,' as Thackeray once 
called him, while looking at one of his half- 
mad letters and remembering his Devotion to' 
that quite mad Sister. I must say I think his 
Letters infinitely better than his Essays ; and 
Patmore says his Conversation, when just 
enough animated by Gin and Water, was better 
than either : which I believe too. Procter said 
he was far beyond the Coleridges, Words- 
worths, Southeys, etc. And I am afraid I be- 
lieve that also." 

Edward FitzGerald to C. E. Norton, June 10, 
1876. 

TO COLERIDGE: 

September 27, 1796. 

My dearest Friend — White, or some of my 

friends, or the public papers, by this time may 

liave informed you of the terrible calamities 

that have fallen on our family. I will only 

103 



Charles Lamb 

give you the outlines : — My poor dear, dearest 
sister, in a fit of insanity, has been the death of 
her own mother. I was at hand only time 
enough to snatch the knife out of her grasp. 
She is at present in a madhouse, from whence I 
fear she must be moved to an hospital. God 
has preserved to me my senses : I eat, and 
drink, and sleep, and have my judgment, I be- 
lieve, very sound. My poor father was slightly 
wounded, and I am left to take care of him 
and my aunt. Mr. Norris, of the Bluecoat 
School, has been very very kind to us, and we 
have no other friend; but, thank God, I am 
very calm and composed, and able to do the 
best that remains to do. Write as religious a 
letter as possible, but no mention of what is 
gone and done with. With me "the former 
things are passed away," and I have something 
more to do than to feel. 
God Almighty have us all in His keeping ! 

C. Lamb. 

Mention nothing of poetry. I have destroyed 
every vestige of past vanities of that kind. Do 
as you please, but if you publish, publish mine 
(I give free leave) without name or initial, and 
never send me a book, I charge you. 

Your own judgment will convince you not to 
take any notice of this yet to your dear wife. 
You look after your family; I have my reason 
and strength left to take care of mine. I charge 
you, don't think of coming to see me. Write. 
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Letters 

I will not see you if you come. God Almighty 
love you and all of us! C. Lamb. 

TO COLERIDGE: 

October 3, 1796. 
My dearest Friend — Your letter was an in- 
estimable treasure to me. It will be a comfort 
to you, I know, to know that our prospects are 
somewhat brighter. My poor dear, dearest sis- 
ter, the unhappy and unconscious instrument 
of the Almighty's judgments on our house, is 
restored to her senses, — to a dreadful sense and 
recollection of what has past, awful to her 
mind, and impressive (as it must be to the end 
of life), but tempered with religious resigna- 
tion and the reasonings of a sound judgment, 
which, in this early stage, knows how to dis- 
tinguish between a deed committed in a tran- 
sient fit of frenzy and the terrible guilt of a 
mother's murder. I have seen her. I found 
her this morning, calm and serene ; far, very 
far from an indecent forgetful serenity : she has 
a most affectionate and tender concern for what 
has happened. Indeed, from the beginning — 
frightful and hopeless as her disorder seemed — 
I had confidence enough in her strength of 
mind and religious principle, to look forward 
to a time when even she might recover tranquil- 
lity. God be praised, Coleridge ! wonderful as 
it is to tell, I have never once been otherwise 
than collected and calm; even on the dreadful 
105 



Charles Lamb 

day, and in the midst of the teirible scene, I 
preserved a tranquillity which bystanders may 
have construed into indifference — a tranquillity 
not of despair. Is it folly or sin in me to say 
that it was a religious principle that most sup- 
ported me? I allow much to other favourable 
circumstances. I felt that I had something else 
to do than to regret. On that first evening my 
aunt was lying insensible — to all appearance 
like one dying; my father, with his poor fore- 
head plaistered over from a wound he had re- 
ceived from a daughter, dearly loved by him, 
and who loved him no less dearly; my mother 
a dead and murdered corpse in the next room; 
yet was I wonderfully supported. I closed not 
my eyes in sleep that night, but lay without ter- 
rors and without despair. I have lost no sleep 
since. I had been long used not to rest in 
things of sense, — had endeavoured after a com- 
prehension of mind, unsatisfied with the "ig- 
norant present time;" and this kept me up. I 
had the whole weight of the family thrown on 
me; for my brother, little disposed (I speak 
not without tenderness for him) at any time to 
take care of old age and infirmities, had now, 
with his bad leg, an exemption from such 
duties, and I was now left alone. One little 
incident may serve to make you understand my 
way of managing my mind : Within a day or 
two after the fatal one, we dressed for dinner 
a tongue, which we had had salted for some 
weeks in the house. As I sat down, a feeling 
1 06 



Letters 

like remorse struck me : this tongue poor Mary 
got for me; and can I partake of it now, when 
she is far away? A thought occurred and re- 
lieved me : — if I give into this way of feeling, 
tnere is not a chair, a room, an object in our 
rooms, that will not awaken the keenest griefs. 
I must rise above such weaknesses. I hope this 
was not want of true feeling. I did not let this 
carry me, though, too far. On the very sec- 
ond day (I date from the day of horrors), as is 
usual in such cases, there were a matter of 
twenty people, I do think, supping in our room : 
they prevailed on me to eat with them (for to 
eat I never refused). They were all making 
merry in the room ! Some had come from 
friendship, some from busy curiosity, and some 
from interest. I was going to partake with 
them, when my recollection came that my poor 
dead mother was lying in the next room — the 
very next room ; — a mother who, through life, 
wished nothing but her children's welfare. In- 
dignation, the rage of grief, something like re- 
morse, rushed upon my mind. In an agony of 
emotion I found my way mechanically to the 
adjoining room, and fell on my knees by the 
side of her coffin, asking forgiveness of Heaven, 
and sometimes of her, for forgetting her so 
soon. Tranquillity returned, and it was the 
only violent emotion that mastered me. I think 
it did me good. 

I mention these things because I hate con- 
cealment, and love to give a faithful journal of 
107 



Charles Lamb 

what passes within me. Our friends have been 
very good. Sam Le Grice, who was then in 
town, was with me the first three or four days, 
and was as a brother to me ; gave up every 
hour of his time, to the very hurting of his 
health and spirits, in constant attendance and 
humouring my poor father ; talked with him, 
read to him, played at cribbage with him (for 
so short is the old man's recollection, that he 
was playing at cards, as though nothing had 
happened, while the coroner's inquest was sit- 
ting over the way!) Samuel wept tenderly 
when he went away, for his mother wrote him 
a very severe letter on his loitering so long in 
town, and he was forced to go. Mr. Norris, 
of Christ's Hospital, has been as a father to 
me — Mrs. Norris as a mother ; though we had 
few claims on them. A gentleman, brother to 
my godmother, from whom we never had right 
or reason to expect any such assistance, sent 
my father twenty pounds ; and to crown all 
these God's blessings to our family at such a 
time, an old lady, a cousin of my father and 
aunt's, a gentlewoman of fortune, is to take my 
aunt and make her comfortable for the short 
remainder of her days. My aunt is recovered, 
and as well as ever, and highly pleased at 
thoughts of going — and has generously given 
up the interest of her little money (which was 
formerly paid my father for her board) wholely 
and solely to my sister's use. Reckoning this, 
we have, Daddy and I, for our two selves and 
108 



Letters 

an old maid-servant to look after him, when 
I am out, which will be necessary, £170 (or 
£180 rather) a-year, out of which we can spare 
£50 or £60 at least for Mary while she stays 
at. Islington, where she must and shall stay 
during her father's life, for his and her com- 
fort. I know John will make speeches about it, 
but she shall not go into an hospital. The good 
lady of the madhouse, and her daughter, an ele- 
gant, sweet-behaved young lady, love her, and 
are taken with her amazingly ; and I know from 
her own mouth she loves them, and longs to be 
with them as much. Poor thing, they say she 
was but the other morning saying she knew she 
must go to Bethlem for life ; that one of her 
brothers would have it so, but the other would 
wish it not, but be obliged to go with the 
stream ; that she had often as she passed Beth- 
lem thought it likely, ''here it may be my fate 
to end my days," conscious of a certain flight- 
iness in her poor head oftentimes, and mind- 
ful of more than one severe illness of that 
nature before. A legacy of £100, which my 
father will have at Christmas, and this £20 I 
mentioned before, with what is in the house, 
will much more than set us clear. If my father, 
an old servant-maid, and I, can't live, and live 
comfortably, on £130 or £120 a-year, we ought 
to burn by slow fires ; and I almost would, that 
Mary might not go into an hospital. Let me 
not leave one unfavourable impression on your 
mind respecting my brother. Since this has 
109 



Charles Lamb 

happened, he has been very kind and brotherly ; 
but I fear for his mind : he has taken his ease 
in the world, and is not fit himself to struggle 
with difficulties, nor has much accustomed him- 
self to throw himself into their way; and I 
know his language is already, "Charles, you 
must take care of yourself; you must not 
abridge yourself of a single pleasure you have 
been used to," etc., etc., and in that style of 
talking. But you, a Necessarian, can respect 
a difference of mind, and love what is amiable 
in a character not perfect. He has been very 
good ; but I fear for his mind. Thank God, I 
can unconnect myself with him, and shall man- 
age all my father's moneys in future myself, 
if I take charge of Daddy, which poor John 
has not even hinted a wish, at any future time 
even, to share with me. The lady at this mad- 
house assures me that I may dismiss imme- 
diately both doctor and apothecary, retaining 
occasionally a composing draught or so for a 
while ; and there is a less expensive establish- 
ment in her house, where she will only not 
have a room and nurse to herself, for £50 or 
guineas a-year — the outside would be £60. You 
know, by economy, how much more even I shall 
be able to spare for her comforts. She will I 
fancy, if she stays, make one of the family, 
rather than of the patients ; and the old and 
young ladies I like exceedingly, and she loves 
dearly; and they, as the saying is, take to her 
very extraordinarily, if it is extraordinary that 
no 



Letters 

people who see my sister should love her. Of 
all the people I ever saw in the world, my poor 
sister was most and thoroughly devoid of the 
least tincture of selfishness. I will enlarge upon 
her qualities, poor dear, dearest soul, in a 
future letter, for my own comfort, for I un- 
derstand her thoroughly ; and, if I mistake not, 
in the most trying situation that a human be- 
ing can be found in, she will be found — (I 
speak not with sufficient humility, I fear), but 
humanly and foolishly speaking, she will be 
found, I trust, uniformly great and amiable. 
God keep her in her present mind ! — to whom 
be thanks and praise for all His dispensations 
to mankind. 

C. Lamb. 

These mentioned good fortunes and change 
of prospects had almost brought my mind over 
to the extreme, the very opposite to despair. 
I was in danger of making myself too happy. 
Your letter brought me back to a view of things 
which I had entertained from the beginning. 
I hope (for Mary I can answer) — but I hope 
that / shall through life never have less recol- 
lection nor a fainter impression of what has 
happened than I have now. 'Tis not a light 
thing, nor meant by the Almighty to be received 
lightly. I must be serious, circumspect, and 
deeply religious through life; and by such 
means may both of us escape madness in 
future, if it so please the Almighty. 



Charles Lamb 

Send me word how it fares with Sara. I re- 
peat it, your letter was, and will be, an ines- 
timable treasure to me. You have a view of 
what my situation demands of me, like my own 
view, and I trust a just one. 

Coleridge, continue to write ; but do not for- 
ever offend me by talking of sending me cash. 
Sincerely, and on my soul, we do not want it. 
God love you both ! 

I will write again very soon. Do you write 
directly. 

TO MANNING* 

November 28, 1800. 
Dear Manning — I have received a very kind 
invitation from Lloyd and Sophia, to go and 
spend a month with them at the Lakes. Now 
it fortunately happens (which is so seldom the 
case) that I have spare cash by me, enough to 
answer the expenses of so long a journey; and 
I am determined to get away from the office by 
some means. The purpose of this letter is to 
request of you (my dear friend), that you will 
not take it unkind if I decline my proposed visit 
to Cambridge for the present. Perhaps I shall 
be able to take Cambridge in my way, going or 
coming. I need not describe to you the ex- 



*Thomas Manning (1772-1840), a brilliant 
mathematician, tutor at Caius College, Cam- 
bridge, where Lamb first met him, and after- 
wards for many years an explorer in China. 



112 



Letters 

pectations which such an one as myself, pent 
up all my life in a dirty city, have formed of a 
tour to the Lakes. Consider Grasmere ! Am- 
bleside ! Wordsworth ! Coleridge ! I hope 
you will. Hills, woods, lakes, and mountains, 
to the devil. I will eat snipes with thee, 
Thomas Manning. Only confess, confess, a 
bite. 

P. S. — I think you named the 16th; but was 
it not modest of Lloyd to send such an invita- 
tion ! It shows his knowledge of money and 
time. I should be loth to think he meant 

"Ironic satire sidelong sklented 
On my poor pursie." — Burns. 

For my part, with reference to my friends 
northward, I must confess that I am not ro- 
mance-bit about Nature. The earth, and sea, 
and sky (when all is said), is but as a house to 
dwell in. If the inmates be courteous, and 
good liquors flow like the conduits at an old 
coronation, if they can talk sensibly, and feel 
properly, I have no need to stand staring upon 
the gilded looking-glass (that strained my 
friend's purse-strings in the purchase) nor his 
five-shilling print, over the mantlepiece of old 
Nabbs the carrier (which only betrays his false 
taste). Just as important to me (in a sense) 
is all the furniture of my world ; eye-pamper- 
ing, but satisfies no heart. Streets, streets, 
streets, markets, theatres, churches, Covent 
Gardens, shops sparkling with pretty faces of 

ii3 



Charles Lamb 

industrious milliners, neat sempstresses, ladies 
cheapening, gentlemen behind counters, lying, 
authors in the street with spectacles, George 
Dyers (you may know them by their gait), 
lamps lit at night, pastrycooks' and silver- 
smiths' shops, beautiful Quakers of Pentonville, 
noise of coaches, drowsy cry of mechanic 
watchmen at night, with bucks reeling home 
drunk; if you happen to wake at midnight, 
cries of "Fire !" and "Stop thief !" ; inns of 
court, with their learned air, and halls, and 
butteries, just like Cambridge colleges; old 
book-stalls, "Jeremy Taylors," "Burtons on 
Melancholy," and "Religio Medicis," on every 
stall. These are thy pleasures, O London ! with 
thy many sins. O City, abounding in w . . ., 
for these may Keswick and her giant brood go 

han S ! C. L. 

TO WORDSWORTH 

January 30, 1801. 
I ought before this to have replied to your 
very kind invitation into Cumberland. With 
you and your sister I could gang anywhere ; but 
I am afraid whether I shall ever be able to af- 
ford so desperate a journey. Separate from 
the pleasure of your company, I don't much 
care if I never see a mountain in my life. I 
have passed all my clays in London, until I 
have formed as manv and intense local attach- 
ments as any of you mountaineers can have 
114 



Letters 

done with dead Nature. The lighted shops of 
the Strand and Fleet Street ; the innumerable 
trades, tradesmen, and customers, coaches, 
wagons, playhouses; all the bustle and wicked- 
ness round about Covent Garden ; the very- 
women of the Town; the watchmen, drunken 
scenes, rattles ; life awake, if you awake, at all 
hours of the night ; the impossibility of being 
dull in Fleet Street; the crowds, the very dirt 
and mud, the sun shining upon houses and 
pavements, the print-shops, the old book-stalls, 
parsons cheapening books, coffee-houses, 
steams of soups from kitchens, the pantomimes 
— London itself a pantomime and a masquerade 
— all these things work themselves into my 
mind, and feed me, without a power of sati- 
ating me. The wonder of these sights impels 
me into night-walks about her crowded streets, 
and I often shed tears in the motley Strand 
from fulness of joy at so much life. All these 
emotions must be strange to you ; so are your 
rural emotions to me. But consider, what must 
I have been doing all my life, not to have lent 
great portions of my heart with usury to such 
scenes ? 

My attachments are all local, purely local. 
I have no passion (or have had none since I 
was in love, and then it was the spurious en- 
gendering- of poetry and books) for groves and 
valleys. The rooms where I was born, the fur- 
niture which has been before my eyes all my 
life, the book-case which has followed me about 

115 



Charles Lamb 

like a faithful dog, (only exceeding him in 
knowledge), wherever I have moved, old 
chairs, old tables, streets, squares, where I 
have sunned myself, my old school, — these are 
my mistresses. Have I not enough, without 
your mountains? I do not envy you. I should 
pity you, did I not know that the mind will 
make friends of anything. Your sun, and 
moon, and skies, and hills, and lakes, affect me 
no more, or scarcely come to me in more 
vener .ble characters, than as a gilded room 
with tapestry and tapers, where I might live 
with handsome visible objects. I consider the 
clouds above me but as a roof beautifully 
painted, but unable to satisfy the mind : and at 
last, like the pictures of the apartment of a 
connoisseur, unable to afford him any longer a 
pleasure. So fading upon me, from disuse, 
have been the beauties of Nature, as they have 
been confinedly called ; so ever fresh, and 
preen, and warm are all the inventions of men, 
and assemblies of men in this great city. I 
should certainly have laughed with dear 
Joanna. 

Give my kindest love, and my sister's, to D. 
and yourself; and a kiss from me to little Bar- 
bara Lewthwaite. Thank you for liking my 

P,3y - C. L. 



116 



Letters 



TO THOMAS MANNING 

London, September 24, 1802. 
My dear Manning — Since the date of my last 
letter I have been a traveller. A strong desire 
seized me of visiting remote regions. My first 
impulse was to go and see Paris. It was a 
trivial objection to my aspiring mind, that I 
did not understand a word of the language, 
since I certainly intend some time in my life 
to see Paris, and equally certainly intend never 
to learn the language ; therefore that could be 
no objection. However, I am very glad I did 
not go, because you had left Paris (I see) be- 
fore I could have set out. I believe, Stoddart 
promising to go with me another year, pre- 
vented that plan. My next scheme (for to my 
restless, ambitious mind London was become a 
bed of thorns) was to visit the far-famed peak 
in Derbyshire, where the Devil sits, they say, 
without breeches. This my purer mind rejected 
as indelicate. And my final resolve was, a 
tour to the Lakes. I set out with Mary to 
Keswick, without giving Coleridge any notice, 
for my time, being precious, did not admit of 
it. He received us with all the hospitality in 
the world, and gave up his time to show us all 
the wonders of the country. He dwells upon a 
small hill by the side of Keswick, in a com- 
fortable house, quite enveloped on all sides by 
a net of mountains : great floundering bears 
117 



Charles Lamb 

and monsters they seemed, ali couchant and 
asleep. We got in in the evening, travelling in 
a post-chaise from Penrith, in the midst of a 
gorgeous sunshine, which transmuted all the 
mountains into colours, purple, etc. etc. We 
thought we had got into fairyland. But that 
went off (as it never came again; while we 
stayed we had no more fine sunsets), and we 
entered Coleridge's comfortable study just in 
the dusk, when the mountains were all dark 
with clouds upon their heads. Such an impres- 
sion I never received from objects of sight be- 
fore, nor do I suppose I can ever again. Glori- 
ous creatures, fine old fellows, Skiddaw, etc. I 
never shall forget ye, how ye lay about that 
night, like an intrenchment ; gone to bed, as it 
seemed for the night, but promising that ye 
were to be seen in the morning. Coleridge had 
got a blazing fire in his study ; which is a large 
antique, ill-shaped room, with an old-fash- 
ioned organ, never played upon, big enough for 
a church, shelves of scattered folios, an ^olian 
harp, and an old sofa, half bed, etc. And all 
looking out upon the last fading view of Skid- 
daw, and his broad-breasted brethren : what a 
night ! Here we stayed three full weeks, in 
which time I visited Wordsworth's cottage, 
where we stayed a day or two with the Clark- 
sons (good people, and most hospitable, at 
whose house we tarried one day and night), 
and saw Lloyd. The Wordsworths were gone 
to Calais. They have since been in London, 
118 



Letters 

and past much time with us : he is now gone 
into Yorkshire to be married. So we have seen 
Keswick, Grasmere, Ambleside, Ulswater 
(where the Clarksons live), and a place at the 
other end of Ulswater; I forget the name; to 
which we travelled on a very sultry day, over 
the middle of Helvellyn. We have clambered 
up to the top of Skiddaw, and I have waded up 
the bed of Lodore. In fine, I have satisfied my- 
self that there is such a thing as that which 
tourists call romantic, which I very much sus- 
pected before : they make such a spluttering 
about it, and toss their splendid epithets around 
them, till they give as dim a light as at four 
o'clock next morning the lamps do after an il- 
lumination. Mary was excessively tired when 
she got about half-way up Skiddaw, but we 
came to a cold rill (than which nothing can be 
imagined more cold, running over cold stones), 
and with the reinforcement of a draught of 
cold water she surmounted it most manfully. 
Oh, its fine black head, and the bleak air atop 
of it, with a prospect of mountains all about 
and about, making you giddy; and then Scot- 
land afar off, and the border countries so fa- 
mous in song and ballad! It was a day that 
will stand out like a mountain, I am sure, in 
my life. But I am returned (I have now been 
come home near three weeks; I was a month 
out), and you cannot conceive the degradation 
I felt at first, from being accustomed to wander 
free as air among mountains, and bathe in 
119 



Charles Lamb 

rivers without being controlled by any one, to 
come home and work. I felt very little. I had 
been dreaming I was a very great man. But 
that is going off, and I find I shall conform 
in time to that state of life to which it has 
pleased God to call me. Besides, after all, Fleet 
Street and the Strand are better places to live 
in for good and all than amidst Skiddaw. Still 
I turn back to those great places where I wan- 
dered about, participating in their greatness. 
After all, I could not live in Skiddaw. I could 
spend a year, two, three years among them, 
but I must have a prospect of seeing Fleet 
Street at the end of that time, or I should mope 
and pine away, I know. Still, Skiddaw is a 
fine creature. My habits are changing, I think, 
i. e. from drunk to sober. Whether I shall be 
happier or not remains to be proved. I shall 
certainly be more happy in a morning; but 
whether I shall not sacrifice the fat, and the 
marrow, and the kidneys, i. e. the night, glori- 
ous care-drowning night, that heals all our 
wrongs, pours wine into our mortifications, 
changes the scene from indifferent and flat to 
bright and brilliant! O Manning, if I should 
have formed a diabolical resolution, by the time 
you come to England, of not admitting any 
spirituous liquors into my house, will you be 
mv guest on such shameworthy terms? Is life, 
with such limitations, worth trying? The truth 
is, that my liquors bring a nest of friendly 
harpies about my house, who consume me. This 



Letters 

is a pitiful tale to be read at St. Gothard, but it 
is just now nearest my heart. Fen wick is a 
ruined man. He is hiding himself from 
his creditors, and. has sent his wife and 
children into the country. Fell, my other 
drunken companion (that has been: nam hie 
ccestus artemque repono), is turned editor 
of a Naval Chronicle. Godwin continues a 
steady friend, though the same facility does 
not remain of visiting him often. That 
. . . has detached Marshall from his house ; 
Marshall, the man who went to sleep 
when the "Ancient Mariner" was reading; the 
old, steady, unalterable friend of the Professor. 
Holcroft is not yet come to town. I expect to 
see him, and will deliver your message. Things 
come crowding in to say, and no room for 'em. 
Some things are too little to be told, — i. e. to 
have a preference ; some are too big and cir- 
cumstantial. Thanks for yours, which was 
most delicious. Would I had been with you, 
benighted, etc. ! I fear my head is turned with 
wandering. I shall never be the same acqui- 
escent being. Farewell. Write again quickly, 
for I shall not like to hazard a letter, not know- 
ing where the fates have carried you. Farewell, 
my dear fellow. 

C. Lamb. 



121 



Charles Lamb 



To Miss HUTCHINSON* 

Thursday, October 19, 1815. 
Dear Miss H. — I am forced to be the replier 
to your letter, for Mary has been ill, and gone 
from home these five weeks yesterday. She has 
left me very lonely and very miserable. I stroll 
about, but there is no rest but at one's own fire- 
side, and there is no rest for me there now. I 
look forward to the worse half being past, and 
keep up as well as I can. She has begun to 
show some favourable symptoms. The return 
of her disorder has been frightfully soon this 
time, with scarce a six months' interval. I am 
almost afraid my worry of spirits about the E. 
I. House was partly the cause of her illness, 
but one always imputes it to the cause next at 
hand ; more probably it comes from some cause 
we have no control over or conjecture of. It cuts 
sad great slices out of the time, the little time, 
we shall have to live together. I don't know but 
the recurrence of these illnesses might help me 
to sustain her death better than if we had had 
no partial separations. But I won't talk of 
death. I will imagine us immortal, or forget 
that we are otherwise. By God's blessing, in a 
few weeks we may be making our meal to- 
gether, or sitting in the front row of the Pit at 
Drury Lane, or taking our evening walk past 



*Miss Hutchinson was a sister of Words- 
worth's wife. 

122 



Letters 

the theatres, to look at the outside of them, at 
least, if not to be tempted in. Then we forget 
we are assailable; we are strong for the time 
as rocks; — "the wind is tempered to the shorn 
Lambs." Poor C. Lloyd, and poor Priscilla ! I 
feel I hardly feel enough for him ; my own 
calamities press about me, and involve me in a 
thick integument not to be reached at by other 
folks' misfortunes. But I feel all I can — all the 
kindness I can towards you all — God bless you ! 
I hear nothing from Coleridge. 
Yours truly, C. Lamb. 



To J. TAYLOR.* 

July 30, 1 82 1. 
Dear Sir — You will do me injustice if you do 
not convey to the writer of the beautiful lines, 
which I now return you, my sense of the ex- 
treme kindness which dictated them. Poor Elia 
(call him Ellia) does not pretend to so very 
clear revelations of a future state of being as 
Olen seems gifted with. He stumbles about 
dark mountains at best; but he knows at least 
how to be thankful for this life, and is too 
thankful indeed for certain relationships lent 
him here, not to tremble for a poss^ ble resump- 
tion of the gift. He is too apt to express him- 
self lightly, and cannot be sorry for the pres- 



*Lamb's publisher. This letter explains the 
origin of the nom-de-plume "Elia." 

123 



Charles Lamb 

ent occasion, as it has called forth a reproof so 
Christian-like. His animus at least (whatever 
become of it in the female termination) hath 
always been cum Christianis. 

Pray make my gratefullest respects to the 
Poet (do I natter myself when I hope it may 

be M y?) and say how happy I should feel 

myself in an acquaintance with him. I will just 
mention that in the middle of the second col- 
umn, where I have affixed a cross, the line 

"One in a skeleton's ribb'd hollow cooped," 

is undoubtedly wrong. Should it not be — 

"A skeleton's rib or ribs?" 
or, 

"In a skeleton ribb'd, hollow-coop'd?" 

I perfectly remember the plate in Quarles. In 
the first page esoteric is pronounced esoteric. 
It should be (if that is the word) esoteric. The 
false accent may be corrected by omitting the 
word old. Pray, for certain reasons, give me 
to the 18th at farthest extremity for my next. 

Poor Elia, the real (for I am but a counter- 
feit), is dead. The fact is, a person of that 
name, an Italian, was a fellow-clerk of mine at 
the South Sea House, thirty (not forty) years 
ago, when the characters I described there ex- 
isted, but had left it like myself many years; 
and I having a brother now there, and doubting 
how he might relish certain descriptions in it, 
I clapt down the name of Elia to it, which 
124 



Letters 

passed off pretty well, for Elia himself added 
the function.of an author to that of a scrivener, 
like myself. 

I went the other day (not having seen him 
for a year) to laugh over with him at my 
usurpation of his name, and found him, alas ! 
no more than a name, for he died of consump- 
tion eleven months ago, and I knew not of it. 

So the name has fairly devolved to me, I 
think ; and 'tis all he has left me. 

Dear sir, yours truly, C. Lamb. 

Messrs. Taylor & Hessey, Fleet Street, 
for J. Taylor, Esq. 



To J. TAYLOR. 

December 7, 1822. 
Dear Sir — I should like the enclosed Dedica- 
tion to be printed, unless you dislike it. I like 
it. It is in the olden style. But if you object to 
it, put forth the book as it is ; only pray don't 
let the printer mistake the word curt for curst. 

C. L. 

DEDICATION 

TO THE FRIENDLY AND JUDICIOUS READER, 

who will take these Papers, as they were 
meant; not understanding everything per- 
versely in its absolute and literal sense, but giv- 
ing fair construction, as to an after-dinner con- 

125 



Charles Lamb 

versation ; allowing for the rashness and neces- 
sary incompleteness of first thoughts; and not 
remembering, for the purpose of an after taunt, 
words spoken peradventure after the fourth 
glass, the Author wishes (what he would will 
for himself) plenty of good friends to stand by 
him, good books to solace him, prosperous 
events to all his honest undertakings, and a 
candid interpretation to his most hasty words 
and actions. The other sort (and he hopes 
many of them will purchase his book too) 
he greets with the curt invitation of Timon, 
"Uncover, dogs, and lap :" or he dismisses 
them with the confident security of the philos- 
opher, — "you beat but on the case of Elia." On 
better consideration, pray omit that Dedication. 
The Essays want no Preface : they are all 
Preface. A Preface is nothing but a talk with 
the reader; and they do nothing else. Pray 
omit it. 

There will be a sort of Preface in the next 
Magazine, which may act as an advertisement, 
but not proper for the volume. 

Let Elia come forth bare as he was born. 

C. L. 

Messrs. Taylor and Hessey, 

Booksellers, Fleet Street. 

No Preface. 



126 



Letters 



To BERNARD BARTON.* 

January g, 1823. 

"Throw yourself on the world without any- 
rational plan of support, beyond what the 
chance employ of booksellers would afford 
you ! ! !" 

Throw yourself rather, my dear sir, from the 
steep Tarpeian rock, slap-dash headlong upon 
iron spikes. If you had but five consola- 
tory minutes between the desk and the bed, 
make much of them, and live a century 
in them, rather than turn slave to the 
booksellers. They are Turks and Tartars when 
they have poor authors at their beck. Hitherto 
you have been at arm's length from them. 
Come not within their grasp. I have known 
many authors for bread, some repining, others 
envying the blessed security of a counting- 
house, all agreeing they would rather have 
been tailors, weavers, — what not, rather than 
the things they were. I have known some 
starved, some to go mad, one dear friend liter- 
ally dying in a workhouse. You know not what 
a rapacious, dishonest set these booksellers are. 
Ask even Southey, who (a single case almost) 
has made a fortune by book drudgery, what he 



*The "Quaker poet," a bank clerk in Wood- 
bridge, Suffolk. His daughter married Edward 
Fitzgerald, who published in 1849 a volume of 
selections from Barton's poetry. 



:27 



Charles Lamb 

has found them. Oh, you know not (may yotl 
never know!) the miseries of subsisting by au- 
thorship. Tis a pretty appendage to a situa- 
tion like yours or mine; but a slavery, worse 
than all slavery, to be a booKseller's dependent, 
to drudge your brains for pots of ale and 
breasts of mutton, to change your free thoughts 
and voluntary numbers for ungracious task- 
work. Those fellows hate us. The reason I 
take to be, that contrary to other trades, in 
which the master gets all the credit (a jewel- 
ler or silversmith for instance), and the jour- 
neyman, who really does the fine work, is in the 
background, — in our work the world gives all 
the credit to us, whom they consider as their 
journeymen, and therefore do they hate us, and 
cheat us, and oppress us, and would wring the 
blood of us out, to put another sixpence in their 
mechanic pouches ! I contend that a bookseller 
has a relative honesty towards authors, not like 
his honesty to the rest of the world. B., who 
first engaged me as "Elia," has not paid me up 
yet (nor any of us without repeated mortifying 
appeals), yet how the knave fawned when I 
was of service to him ! Yet I dare say the fel- 
low is punctual in settling his milk-score, etc. 

Keep to your bank, and the bank will keep 
you. Trust not to the public; you may hang, 
starve, drown yourself, for anything that 
worthy personage cares. I bless every star that 
Providence, not seeing good to make me inde- 
pendent, has seen it next good to settle me upom 
128 



Letters 

the stable foundation of Leadenhall. Sit down, 
good B. B., in the banking-office. What ! is 
there not from six to eleven p.m. six days in the 
week, and is there not all Sunday ? Fie, what a 
superfluity of man's time, if you could think 
so ! — enough for relaxation, mirth, converse, 
poetry, good thoughts, quiet thoughts. Oh the 
corroding, torturing, tormenting thoughts, that 
disturb the brain of the unlucky wight who 
must draw upon it for daily sustenance ! 
Henceforth I retract all my fond complaints of 
mercantile employment ; look upon them as lov- 
ers' quarrels. I was but half in earnest. Wel- 
come dead timber of a desk, that makes me 
live. A little grumbling is a wholesome medi- 
cine for the spleen ; but in my inner heart do 
I approve and embrace this our close but un- 
harassing way of life. I am quite serious. If 
you can send me Fox, I will not keep it six 
weeks, and will return it, with warm thanks to 
yourself and friend, without blot or dog's ear. 
You will much oblige me by this kindness. 
Yours truly, C. Lamb. 

TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 

Colebrook Cottage, April 6, 1825. 
Dear Wordsworth — I have been several times 
meditating a letter to you concerning the good 
thing which has befallen me, but the thought of 
poor Monkhouse came across me. He was one 
that I had exulted in the prospect of congratu- 
129 



Charles Lamb 

lating me. He and you were to have been the 
first participators, for indeed it has been ten 
weeks since the first motion of it. Here am I 
then, after thirty-three years' slavery, sitting in 
my own room at eleven o'clock this finest of 
all April mornings, a freed man, with £441 a 
year for the remainder of my life, live I as long 
as John Dennis, who outlived his annuity and 
starved at ninety; £441, i. e. £450, with a de- 
duction of £g for a provision secured to my 
sister, she being survivor, the pension guaran- 
teed by Act Georgii Tertii, etc. 

I came home for ever on Tuesday in last 
week. The incomprehensibleness of my condi- 
tion overwhelmed me. It was like passing 
from life into eternity. Every year to be as 
long as three, i. e. to have three times as much 
real time (time that is my own) in it ! I 
wandered about thinking I was happy, but feel- 
ing I was not. But that tumultuousness is 
passing off, and I begin to understand the 
nature of the gift. Holydays, even the annual 
month, were always uneasy joys; their con- 
scious fugitiveness ; the craving after making 
the most of them. Now, when all is holyday, 
there are no holydays. I can sit at home, in 
rain or shine, without a restless impulse for 
walkings. I am daily steadying, and shall soon 
find it as natural to me to be my own master, 
as it has been irksome to have had a master. 
Mary wakes every morning with an obscure 
feeling that some good has happened to us. 
130 



Letters 

Leigh Hunt and Montgomery, after their re- 
leasements, describe the shock of their emanci- 
pation much as I feel mine. But it hurt their 
frames. I eat, drink, and sleep as sound as 
ever. I lay no anxious schemes for going 
hither and thither, but take things as they oc- 
cur. Yesterday I excursioned twenty miles; 
to-day I write a few letters. Pleasuring was 
for fugitive play-days ; mine are fugitive only 
in the sense that life is fugitive. Freedom and 
life co-existent ! 

At the foot of such a call upon you for 
gratulation, I am ashamed to advert to that 
melancholy event. Monkhouse was a charac- 
ter I learned to love slowly, but it grew upon 
me, yearly, monthly, daily. What a chasm has 
it made in our pleasant parties ! His noble 
friendly face was always coming before me, 
till this hurrying event in my life came, and 
for the time has absorbed all interest; in fact 
it has shaken me a little. My old desk com- 
panions, with whom I have had such merry 
hours, seem to reproach me for removing my 
lot from among them. They were pleasant 
creatures ; but to the anxieties of business, and 
a weight of possible worse ever impending, I 
was not equal. Tuthill and Gillman gave me 
my certificates. I laughed at the friendly lie 
implied in them; but my sister shook her 'head, 
and said it was all true. Indeed, this last Win- 
ter I was jaded out: Winters were always 
worse than other parts of the year, because the 

131 



Charles Lamb 

spirits are worse, and I had no daylight. In 
Summer I had day-light evenings. The relief 
was hinted to me from a superior Power, when 
I, poor slave, had not a hope but that I must 
wait another seven years with Jacob : and lo ! 
the Rachel which I coveted is brought to me ! 

Have you read the noble dedication of Irv- 
ing's "Missionary Orations" to S. T. C. ? Who 
shall call this man a quack hereafter? What 
the Kirk will think of it neither I nor Irving 
care. When somebody suggested to him that 
it would not be likely to do him good, videlicet, 
among his own people, "That is a reason for 
doing it," was his noble answer. That Irving 
thinks he has profited mainly by S. T. C, I 
have no doubt. The very style of the Dedica- 
tion shows it. 

Communicate my news to Southey, and beg 
his pardon for my being so long acknowledging 
his kind present of the "Church," which cir- 
cumstances, having no reference to himself, 
prevented at the time. Assure him of my 
deep respect and friendliest feelings. 

Divide the same, or rather each take the 
whole to you — I mean you and all yours. To 
Miss Hutchinson I must write separate. 

Farewell ! and end at last, long selfish letter. 

C. Lamb. 



132 



Letters 



TO BERNARD BARTON 

Enfield Chase Side, Saturday, 
2$th of July, a. d. 1829, II A. M. 
There! — a fuller, plumper, juicier date never 
dropt from Idumean palm. Am I in the date- 
ive case now? If not, a fig for dates, which 
is more than a date is worth. I never stood 
much affected to these limitary specialties ; least 
of all, since the date of mv superannuation. 

"What have I with time to do? 
Slaves of desks, 'twas meant for you." 

Dear B. B. — Your handwriting has conveyed 
much pleasure to me in report of Lucy's res- 
toration. Would I could send you as good 
news of my poor Lucy. But some wearisome 
weeks I must remain lonely yet. I have had 
the loneliest time, near ten weeks, broken by a 
short apparition of Emma for her holidays, 
whose departure only deepened the returning 
solitude, and by ten days I have past in town. 
But town, with all my native hankering after 
it, is not what it was. The streets, the shops 
are left ; but all old friends are gone ! And in 
London I was frightfully convinced of this as 
I passed houses and places, empty caskets now. 
I have ceased to care almost about anybody. 
The bodies I cared for are in graves, or dis- 
persed. My old clubs, that lived so long and 
flourished so steadily, are crumbled away. 
133 



Charles Lamb 

When I took leave of our adopted young friend 
at Charing Cross, 'twas heavy unfeeling rain, 
and I had nowhere to go. Home have I none, 
and not a sympathising house to turn to in the 
great city. Never did the waters of heaven 
pour down on a forlorner head. Yet I tried 
ten days at a sort of friend's house, but it was 
large and straggling, — one of the individuals of 
my old long knot of friends, card-players, 
pleasant companions, that have tumbled to 
pieces, into dust and other things; and I got 
home on Thursday, convinced that I was bet- 
ter to get home to my hole at Enfield, and 
hide like a sick cat in my corner. Less than a 
month I hope will bring home Mary. She is 
at Fulham, looking better in her health than 
ever, but sadly rambling, and scarce showing 
any pleasure in seeing me, or curiosity when I 
should come again. But the old feelings will 
come back again, and we shall drown old sor- 
rows over a game of picquet again. But 'tis a 
tedious cut out of a life of sixty-four, to lose 
twelve or thirteen weeks every year or two. 
And to make me more alone, our ill-tempered 
maid is gone, who, with all her airs, was yet a 
home-piece of furniture, a record of better 
days. The young thing that has succeeded her 
is good and attentive, but she is nothing. And 
I have no one here to talk over old matters 
with. Scolding and quarrelling have some- 
thing of familiarity, and a community of in- 
terest; they imply acquaintance; they are of 

134 



Letters 

resentment, which is of the family of clearness. 
I can neither scold nor quarrel at this in- 
significant implement of household services: 
she is less than a cat, and just better than a 
deal dresser. What I can do, and do over- 
do, is to walk; but deadly long are the days, 
these Summer all-day days, with but a half- 
hour's candle-light, and no fire-light. I do not 
write, tell your kind inquisitive Eliza, and can 
hardly read. In the ensuing Blackwood will be 
an old dejected farce of mine, which may be 
new to you, if you see that same medley. What 
things are all the magazines now ! I contrive 
studiously not to see them. The popular New 
Monthly is perfect trash. Poor Hessey, I sup- 
pose you see, has failed ; Hunt and Clarke too. 
Your "Vulgar Truths" will be a good name; 
and I think your prose must please — me at 
least. But 'tis useless to write poetry with no 
purchasers. 'Tis cold work authorship, with- 
out something to puff one into fashion. Could 
you not write something on Quakerism, for 
Quakers to read, but nominally addressed to 
Non-Quakers, explaining your dogmas — wait- 
ing on the Spirit — by the analogy of human 
calmness and patient waiting on the judgment? 
I scarcely know what I mean, but to make 
Non-Quakers reconciled to your doctrines, by 
showing something like them in mere human 
operations ; but I hardly understand myself ; so 
let it pass for nothing. I pity you for over- 
work ; but I assure you, no work is worse. The 
135 



Charles Lamb 

mind preys on itself, the most unwholesome 
food. I bragged formerly that I could not have 
too much time. I have a surfeit. With few 
years to come, the days are wearisome. But 
weariness is not eternal. Something will shine 
out to take the load off that flags me, which is 
at present intolerable. I have killed an hour or 
two in this poor scrawl. I am a sanguinary 
murderer of time, and would kill him inch- 
meal just now. But the snake is vital. Well : 
I shall write merrier anon. 'Tis the present 
copy of my countenance I send, and to com- 
plain is a little to alleviate. May you enjoy 
yourself as far as the wicked wood will let you, 
and think that you are not quite alone as I am ! 
Health to Lucia, and to Anna, and kind re- 
membrances. Your forlorn, C. L. 



TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 

January 22, 1830. 
And is it a year since we parted from you at 
the steps of Edmonton stage? There are not 
now the years that there used to be. The tale 
of the dwindled age of men, reported of suc- 
cessional mankind, is true of the same man 
only. We do not live a year in a year now. 
'Tis a punctum stans. The seasons pass us 
with indifference. Spring cheers not, nor Win- 
ter heightens our gloom ; Autumn hath fore- 
gone its moralities, — they are fi hey-pass re- 
136 



Letters 

pass," as in a show-box. Yet, as far as last 
year occurs back, — for they scarce show a re- 
flex now, they make no memory as heretofore, 
— 'twas sufficiently gloomy. Let the sullen 
nothing pass. Suffice it that after sad spirits, 
prolonged through many of its months, as it 
called them, we have cast our skins ; have taken 
a farewell of the pompous, troublesome trifle, 
called housekeeping, and are settled down into 
poor boarders and lodgers at next door with an 
old couple, the Baucis and Baucida of dull En- 
field. Here we have nothing to do with our 
victuals but to eat them ; with the garden but 
to see it grow; with the tax-gatherer but to 
hear him knock ; with the maid but to hear her 
scolded. Scot and lot, butcher, baker, are 
things unknown to us, save as spectators of the 
pageant. We are fed we know not how; 
quietists — confiding ravens. We have otium 
pro dignitate, a respectable insignificance. Yet 
in the self-condemned obliviousness, in the 
stagnation, some molesting yearnings of life, 
not quite killed, rise, prompting me that there 
was a London, and that I was of that old 
Jerusalem. In dreams I am in Fleet Market, 
but I wake and cry to sleep again. I die hard, 
a stubborn Eloisa in this detestable Paraclete. 
What have I gained by health? Intolerable 
dulness. What by early hours and moderate 
meals? A total blank. O never let the lying 
poets be believed, who 'tice men from the 
cheerful haunts of streets, or think they mean 

137 



Charles Lamb 

it not of a country village. In the ruins of 
Palmyra I could gird myself up to solitude, or 
muse to the snorings of the Seven Sleepers ; but 
to have a little teazing image of a town about 
one ; country folks that do not look like coun- 
try folks ; shops two yards square, half-a-dozen 
apples, and two penn'orth of overlooked gin- 
ger-bread for the lofty fruiterers of Oxford 
Street; and, for the immortal book and print 
stalls a circulating library that stands still, 
where the show-picture is a last year's Valen- 
tine, and whither the fame of the last ten 
Scotch novels has not yet travelled, — (marry, 
they just begin to be conscious of the Red- 
gauntlet:) — to have a new plastered flat 
church, and to be wishing that it was but a 
cathedral ! The very blackguards here are de- 
generate ; the topping gentry stock-brokers ; the 
passengers too many to insure your quiet, or 
let you go about whistling or gaping, too few 
to be the fine indifferent pageants of Fleet 
Street. Confiding, room-keeping, thickest Win- 
ter, is yet more bearable here than the gaudy 
months. Among one's books at one's fire by 
candle, one is soothed into an oblivion that one 
is not in the country ; but with the light the 
green fields return, till I gaze, and in a calen- 
ture can plunge myself into St. Giles's. O let 
no native Londoner imagine that health, and 
rest, and innocent occupation, interchange of 
converse sweet, and recreative study, can make 
the country anything better than altogether 
138 



Letters* 

odious and detestable! A garden was the 
primitive prison, till man, with Promethean 
felicity and boldness, luckily sinned himself out 
of it. Thence followed Babylon, Nineveh, 
Venice, London, haberdashers, goldsmiths, tav- 
erns, playhouses, satires, epigrams, puns, — 
these all came in on the town part, and the 
thither side of innocence. Man found out in- 
ventions. From my den I return you con- 
dolence for your decaying sight; not for any- 
thing there is to see in the country, but for the 
miss of the pleasure of reading a London news- 
paper. The poets are as well to listen to; any- 
thing high may, nay must, be read out; you 
read it to yourself with an imaginary auditor; 
but the light paragraphs must be glid over by 
the proper eye; mouthing mumbles their gos- 
samery substance. 'Tis these trifles I should 
mourn in fading sight. A newspaper is the 
single gleam of comfort I receive here; it 
comes from rich Cathay with tidings of man- 
kind. Yet I could not attend to it, read out by 
the most beloved voice. But your eyes do not 
get worse, I gather. O for the collyrium of 
Tobias inclosed in a whiting's liver, to send 
you with no apocryphal good wishes ! The last 
long time I heard from you, you had knocked 
your head against something. Do not do so; 
for your head (I do not flatter) is not a 
knob, or the top of a brass nail, or the end of a 
nine pin, — unless a Vulcanian hammer could 
fairly batter a "Recluse" out of it; then would 
139 



Charles Lamb 

I bid the smirched god knock and knock lustily, 
the two-handed skinker. Mary must squeeze 
out a line propria manu, but indeed her fingers 
have been incorrigibly nervous to letter writing 
for a long interval. 'Twill please you all to 
hear, that though I fret like a lion in a net, her 
present health and spirits are better than they 
have been for some time past. She is absolutely 
three years and a half younger, as I tell her, 
since we have adopted this boarding plan. 

Our providers are an honest pair, Dame 
W[estwood] and her husband. He, when the 
light of prosperity shined on them, a moder- 
ately thriving haberdasher, within Bow bells, 
retired since with something under a compe- 
tence; writes himself parcel gentleman; hath 
borne parish offices ; sings fine old sea songs at 
threescore and ten ; sighs only now and then 
when he thinks that he has a son on his hands, 
about fifteen, whom he finds a difficulty in get- 
ting out into the world, and then checks a sigh 
with muttering, as I once heard him prettily, 
not meaning to be heard, "I have married my 
daughter, however;" takes the weather as it 
comes : outsides it to town in severest season ; 
and o'winter nights tells old stories not tend- 
ing to literature (how comfortable to author- 
rid folks!), and has one anecdote, upon which 
and about forty pounds a year he seems to have 
retired in green old age. It was how he was a 
rider in his youth, travelling for shops, and 
once (not to balk his employer's bargain) on a 
140 



Letters 

sweltering day in August, rode foaming into 
Dunstable upon a mad horse, to the dismay 
and expostulatory wonderment of innkeepers, 
ostlers, etc., who declared they would not have 
bestrid the beast to win the Derby. Under- 
stand, the creature galled to death and despera- 
tion by gad-flies, cormorant-winged, worse 
than beset Inachus's daughter. This he tells, 
this he brindles and burnishes on a Winter's 
eve ; 'tis his star of set glory, his rejuvenes- 
cence, to descant upon. Far from me be it (dii 
avertant) to look a gift story in the mouth, or 
cruelly to surmise (as those who doubt the 
plunge of Curtius) that the inseparate conjunc- 
ture of man and beast, the centaur-phenomenon 
that staggered all Dunstable, might have been 
the effect of unromantic necessity; that the 
horse-part carried the reasoning, willy nilly; 
that needs must when such a devil drove; that 
certain spiral configurations in the frame of 
T [nomas] W[estwood] unfriendly to alighting, 
made the alliance more forcible than voluntary. 
Let him enjoy his fame for me, nor let me hint 
a whisper that shall dismount Bellerophon. 
But in case he was an involuntary martyr, yet 
if in the fiery conflict he buckled the soul of a 
constant haberdasher to him, and adopted his 
flames, let accident and him share the glory. 
You would all like Thomas Westwood. How 
weak is painting to describe a man ! Say that 
he stands four feet and a nail high by his own 
yard measure, which, like the sceptre of Aga- 
141 



Essays 



memnon, shall never sprout again, still you 
have no adequate idea; nor when I tell you 
that his dear hump, which I have favoured in 
the picture, seems to me of the buffalo — indica- 
tive and repository of mild qualities, a budget 
of kindnesses — still you have not the man. 
Knew you old Norris of the Temple? sixty 
years ours and our father's friend? He was 
not more natural to us tha*i this old W., the 
acquaintance of scarce more weeks. Under his 
roof now ought I to take my rest, but that 
back-looking ambition tells me I might yet be 
a Londoner ! Well, if we ever do move, we 
have incumbrances the less to impede us; all 
our furniture has faded under the auctioneer's 
hammer, going for nothing, like the tarnished 
frippery of the prodigal, and we have only a 
spoon or two left to bless us. Clothed we came 
into Enfield, and naked we must go out of it. 
I would live in London shirtless, bookless. 
Henry Crabb is at Rome ; advices to that effect 
have reached Bury. But by solemn legacy he 
bequeathed at parting (whether he should live 
or die) a turkey of Suffolk to be sent every 
succeeding Christmas to us and divers other 
friends. What a genuine old bachelor's ac- 
tion ! I fear he will find the air of Italy too 
classic. His station is in the Harz forest; his 
soul is be-Goethed. Miss Kelly we never see; 
Talfourd not this half-year: the latter flour- 
ishes, but the exact number of his children 
(God forgive me!) I have utterly forgotten. 
142 



Letters 

We single people are often out in our count 
there. Shall I say two? We see scarce any- 
body. Can I cram loves enough to you all in 
this little O ? Excuse particularising. 

C. L. 



TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 

[End of May nearly] 1833. 

Dear Wordsworth — Your letter, save in what 
respects your dear sister's health, cheered me 
in my new solitude. Mary is ill again. Her 
illnesses encroach yearly. The last was three 
months, followed by two of depression most 
dreadful. I look back upon her earlier attacks 
with longing : nice little durations of six weeks 
or so, followed by complete restoration, — 
shocking as they were to me then. In short, 
half her life she is dead to me, and the other 
half is made anxious with fears and lookings 
forward to the next shock. With such pros- 
pects, it seemed to me necessary that she should 
no longer live with me, and be fluttered with 
continued removals ; so I am come to live with 
her, at a Mr. Walden's and his wife, who take 
in patients, and have arranged to lodge and 
board us only. They have had the care of her 
before. I see little of her : alas ! I too often 
hear her. Sunt lachryma? rerum! and you and 
I must bear it. 

To lay a little more load on it, a circumstance 
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Charles Lamb 

has happened, cujus pars magna fui, and which, 
at another crisis, I should have more rejoiced 
in. I am about to lose my old and only walk- 
companion, whose mirthful spirits were the 
"youth of our house," Emma Isola. I have 
her here now for a little while, but she is too 
nervous, properly to be under such a roof, so 
she will make short visits, — be no more an in- 
mate. With my perfect approval, and more 
than concurrence, she is to be wedded to 
Moxon, at the end of August — so "perish the 
roses and the flowers" — how is it? 

Now to the brighter side. I am emancipated 
from the Westwoods, and I am with attentive 
people, and younger. I am three or four miles 
nearer the great city; coaches half-price less, 
and going always, of which I will avail my- 
self. . I have few friends left there, one or two 
though, most beloved. But London streets and 
faces cheer me inexpressibly, though not one 
known of the latter were remaining. 

Thank you for your cordial reception of 
"Elia." Inter nos, the Ariadne is not a darling 
with me; several incongruous things are in it, 
but in the composition it served me as illus- 
trative. 

I want you in the "Popular Fallacies" to like 
the "Home that is no home," and "Rising with 
the lark." 

I am feeble, but cheerful in this my genial 
hot weather. Walked sixteen miles yesterday. 
I can't read much in summer time. 
144 



Letters 

With my kindest love to all, and prayers 
for dear Dorothy, 
I remain most affectionately yours, 

C. Lamb. 

At Mr. Walden's, Church Street, Edmonton, 
Middlesex. 

Moxon has introduced Emma to Rogers, and 
he smiles upon the project. I have given E. 
my Milton (will you pardon me) in part of 
a portion. It hangs famously in his Murray- 
like shop. 



145 



Verses 



VERSES 



A FAREWELL TO TOBACCO 

May the Babylonish curse 

Straight confound my stammering verse, 

If I can a passage see 

In this word-perplexity, 

Or a fit expression find, 

Or a language to my mind, 

(Still the phrase is wide or scant) 

To take leave of thee, great plant! 

Or in any terms relate 

Half my love, or half my hate: 

For I hate yet love thee so, 

That, whichever thing I show, 

The plain truth will seem to be 

A constrain'd hyperbole, 

And the passion to proceed 

More from a mistress than a weed. 

Sooty retainer to the vine, 
Bacchus' black servant, negro fine; 
Sorcerer, that mak'st us dote upon 
Thy begrimed complexion, 
149 



Charles Lamb 

And, for thy pernicious sake, 

More and greater oaths to break 

Than reclaimed lovers take 

'Gainst women : thou thy siege dost lay 

Much too in the female way, 

While thou suck'st the lab'ring breath 

Faster than kisses or than death. 

Thou in such a cloud dost bind us, 
That our worst foes cannot find us, 
And ill fortune, that would thwart us, 
Shoots at rovers, shooting at us; 
While each man, through thy height'ning 

steam, 
Does like a smoking Etna seem, 
And all about us does express 
(Fancy and wit in richest dress) 
A Sicilian fruitfulness. 

Thou through such a mist dost show us, 
That our best friends do not know us, 
And, for those allowed features, 
Due to reasonable creatures, 
Liken'st us to fell Chimeras 
Monsters that, who see us, fear us; 
Worse than Cerberus or Geryon, 
Or, who first loved a cloud, Ixion. 

Bacchus we know, and we allow 
His tipsy rites. But what art thou, 
That but by reflex canst show 
What his deity can do, 

150 



Verses 

As the false Egyptian spell 
Aped the true Hebrew miracle? 
Some few vapours thou may'st raise. 
The weak brain may serve to amaze, 
But to the reins and nobler heart 
Canst nor life nor heat impart. 

Brother of Bacchus, later born, 
The old world was sure forlorn 
Wanting thee, that aidest more 
The god's victories than before 
All his panthers, and the brawls 
Of his piping Bacchanals. 
These, as stale, we disallow, 
Or judge of thee meant: only thou 
His true Indian conquest art; 
And, for ivy round his dart, 
The reformed god now weaves 
A finer thyrsus of thy leaves. 

Scent to match thy rich perfume 
Chemic art did ne'er presume 
Through her quaint alembic strain, 
None so sov'reign to the brain. 
Nature, that did in thee excel, 
Framed again no second smell. 
Roses, violets, but toys 
For the smaller sort of boys, 
Or for greener damsels meant; 
Thou art the only manly scent. 

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Charles Lamb 

Stinking' st of the stinking kind, 
Filth of the mouth and fog of the mind, 
Africa, that brags her foison, 
Breeds no such prodigious poison, 
Henbane, nightshade, both together, 
Hemlock, aconite — 

Nay, rather, 
Plant divine, of rarest virtue; 
Blisters on the tongue would hurt you. 
'Twas but in a sort I blamed thee; 
None e'er prosper'd who defamed thee; 
Irony all, and feign'd abuse, 
Such as perplex'd lovers use, 
At a need, when, in despair 
To paint forth their fairest fair, 
Or in part but to express 
That exceeding comeliness 
Which their fancies doth so strike, 
They borrow language of dislike ; 
And, instead of Dearest Miss, 
Jewel, Honey, Sweetheart, Bliss, 
And those forms of old admiring, 
Call her Cockatrice and Siren, 
Basilisk, and all that's evil, 
Witch, Hyena, Mermaid, Devil, 
Ethiop, Wench, and Blackamoor, 
Monkey, Ape, and twenty more; 
Friendly Trait'ress, loving Foe, — 
Not that she is truly so, 
But no other way they know 



152 



Verses 

A contentment to express, 
Borders so uoon excess, 
That they do not rightly wot 
Whether it be pain or not. 

Or, as men constrain'd to part 
With what's nearest to their heart, 
While their sorrow's at the height, 
Lose discrimination quite, 
And their hasty wrath let fall, 
To appease their frantic gall, 
On the darling thing whatever 
Whence they feel it death to sever, 
Though it be, as they, perforce, 
Guiltless of the sad divorce, 

For I must (nor let it grieve thee, 
Friendliest of plants, that I must) leave thee. 
For thy sake, tobacco, I 
Would do anything but diie, 
And but seek to extend my days 
Long enough to sing thy praise. 
But, as she, who once hath been 
A king's consort, is a queen 
Ever after, nor will bate 
Any tittle of her state, 
Though a widow, or divorced, 
So I, from thy converse forced, 
The old name and style retain, 
A right Katherine of Spain ; 
And a seat, too, 'mongst the joys 
Of the blest Tobacco Boys ; 
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Charles Lamb 

Where, though I, by sour physician, 
Am debarr'd the full fruition 
Of thy favours, I may catch 
Some collateral sweets, and snatch 
Sidelong odours, that give life 
Like glances from a neighbour's wife; 
And still live in the by-places 
And the suburbs of thy graces; 
And in thy borders take delight, 
An unconquer'd Canaanite. 



SHE IS GOING 

For their eldest Sister's hair 
Martha does a wreath prepare 
Of bridal rose, ornate and gay 
To-morrow is the wedding day. 

She is going. 

Mary, youngest of the three, 
Laughing idler, full of glee, 
Arm in arm does fondly chain her, 
Thinking (poor trifler!) to detain her; 
But she's going. 

Vex not, maidens, nor regret 
Thus to part with Margaret. 
Charms like yours can never stay 
Long within doors; and one day 
You'll be going. 

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Verses 



THE OLD FAMILIAR FACES 

I have had playmates, I have had companions, 
In my days of childhood, in my joyful school- 
days, 
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. 

I have been laughing, I have been carousing, 
Drinking late, sitting late, with my bosom 

cronies, 
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. 

I loved a love once, fairest among women; 
Closed are her doors on me, I must not see 

her — 
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. 

I have a friend, a kinder friend has no man; 
Like an ingrate, I left my friend abruptly ; 
Left him, to muse on the old familiar faces. 

Ghost-like I paced round the haunts of my 

childhood. 
Earth seem'd a desert I was bound to traverse, 
Seeking to find the old familiar faces. 

Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother, 
Why wert not thou born in my father's dwell- 
ing? 
So might we talk of the old familiar faces — 



155 



Charles Lamb 

How some they have died, and some they have 

left me, 
And some are taken from me; all are departed; 
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. 



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